User Comments - auntie68

Posted on: Airplane Arrival

Some examples (from my little dictionary; translated by me):

本省 ＝ "this province"

本地 ＝ "local"

本地区 = "this district" 

参加今天会议的本校教师有十五位。

＝ The teachers from this school who attended (or: "are attending" or "will attend") this meeting are 15 in number.

这些东西都是本地生产的。

＝ These things are all locally produced.

本人每月都能领到一些奖金。

＝  I'm not sure about this one! I think it means "I (or "he") was able to win some prizes every month."

I'm sorry I don't have time to pinyin-ize these examples, hope it can be helpful nevertheless.

Posted on: Airplane Arrival

Hello raychenon. 架 (jia4) is the classifier for an aircraft. Eg. 一架飞机. So 本架飞机 means "this plane we're on". Better? Cheers.

Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen

Hello alwingate. All you sentences sound fine to me except that I think "I am above you" should perhaps be "wo3 zai4 ni3 de shang4mian4" (我在你的上面). I think it's safe to drop all the 的‘s (de's) if you like eg. wo3 zai4 ni3 qian2mian4 etc. Okay, it's late... take care.

P/s: In the Chinese character "shang4；above, up" - 上 - all the action is happening above the horizontal line. In the character "xia4; down, below" - 下 -, all the action takes place below that horizontal line... but I suppose that's not news for you.

Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen

Oh dear tezuk, I've just read your post. Can you let this one slide? Just this time. I'll do my very best to keep on-topic after this. Thanks for your patience. All the best.

Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen

Ouch, alwingate, I know what you mean about my bad habit of ending my sentences with a preposition... it drives one of my dear friends absolutely bonkers! And because I am -- after all -- a dear friend, he has to keep his cool (or his wife, my friend), will read him the Riot Act. 

Now that you've finally told me a little bit about your circumstances, I'll be humble and shut up. Yes! You live and work in Taiwan; my everyday life is in Singapore, where everybody speaks English. It's not good English, it's Singlish, but everybody is speaking it as a first language. It makes a difference.

All the best with those Chinese characters. Try not to let them grind you down (says the Singaporean who has never had to open a bank account in Chinese...). "Character recognition" can be a pretty modest goal, just be open to new things, and let it all take you as far as you can go. Don't be afraid to try learning to recognize some characters, even if it's just the "characters du jour" in the Newbie pdfs... it doesn't mean anything like "I surrender to the Chinese characters!", it's... it's merely knowledge.

Stunt Toddler will be jetting into Singapore in just over an hour, I'm so excited! It was only a short holiday, but I missed my nephew! Take care.

Posted on: I Can/Can't Afford it (...得起 & ...不起）

Hi. I haven't read "Wlld Swans", but if it is a reasonably faithful account of what an average family lost during the Cultural Revolution, it will not be easy to read.

My maternal grandfather was born in China in 1901. He emigrated to Singapore with his young family in the late 1930s/ early 1940s because the Kuomintang had a death warrant out for him. He was a communist. In Singapore, my "China grandfather" kept his past very quiet, because Singapore then was very right-wing. My mother was born in 1946, one of the Singapore-born children.

In the 1970s, my China grandfather finally reached the age of 70, which at the time was the age when he could travel freely to China under Singapore law.

His brief visit to China shocked him so deeply that he couldn't speak for days after returning to Singapore. The only thing he could say (in English, for our benefit; he was fluent in English) was, "China... is finished. Finished. There is no hope". I was a very precocious eight-year-old (two years earlier, my school concluded that I was reading at the level of a 10 - 11-year old), and I remember this clearly. He was so sad.

My China grandfather was devastated. He never returned to China again. What shocked him most deeply, according to his wife, was the way his cousins -- who were all university professors -- were living like animals following the Cultural Revolution. He was very upset that they had no furniture, save for a few discarded cardboard boxes which they used as some kind of table. They slept on the dirt floor. Some of his cousins appeared to be suffering from psychiatric illnesses.

I think it was worse for my grandfather because he had been so idealistic -- fired up by the May 4th movement's ideals -- that he even defied his own family, abandoning his traditional "scholar"'s education in order to study civil engineering. He was so in love with China that he studied English and German, not to leave China for higher pay elsewhere, but so that he could study engineering and help to build up China on equal terms with "Westerners". In fact, he became a commissioned army officer, a military engineer. Yet he had to leave China because the Kuomintang labelled him as a communist, and even so, the communists destroyed his family in Whampoa, China. 

I love China, but I shall never ever allow myself to be lulled into forgetting what China did to her own people during the Cultural Revolution. 

Posted on: Hiking

I've noticed that Ken -- after his long residence in China -- pronounces the word "level" so that it rhymes with "navel" (eg. LAY-vel"), but Jenny -- the Mandarin native speaker -- pronounces the same word in exactly the way suggested by the IPA pronunciation notes in my Pocket Oxford English Dictionary. You go figure... 

As far as I'm concerned, both Ken and Jenny are very gifted and effective teachers of Mandarin. And they are both fluent English speakers, explaining all the language points in articulate, natural-sounding, and correct English. We can't ask for more, surely? To me, both Ken and Jenny are respected teachers whom I look up to. Despite what my tone might suggest, when I'm being grumpy and unreasonable.

Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen

Dear alwingate, I've just read the comments by changye and suburbanite. Just so that you know where I'm coming from, a lot of what you write about the need for more "structure" in CPOD resonates with me. I enjoy reading your posts, which are refreshingly unconventional.

If ever you should ask a lesson-related question on any of these threads, you can be sure that I'll take care to pinyin-ize any answer which I might attempt to offer you directly. Because I know how you feel about pinyin-less comments in Newbie/Ele threads.

But if somebody like shuaibao asks a direct question in very simple, un-fancy -- but confident -- no-pinyin Chinese, I think it's okay for me to reply directly in a similar manner. Because I know that the recipient won't have problems understanding my answer.

Please don't be offended, alwingate, but not understanding what shauibao wrote, because it was written in Chinese characters, is no loss to you. Nor is my non-pinyin answer so valuable or relevant (no way!) that it's a problem if anybody -- apart from the person I was trying to "help" -- found it unintelligible.

If, however, the mere fact that you are seeing Chinese characters in a lower-level lesson is making you angry, well then that can't be helped, regardless of anybody's best intentions. But I don't think that's the case?

Chinese characters tend to creep in, despite our best intentions, because it's really, really counter-intuitive to write everything twice over. Quite often I will omit the pinyin as long as I can be very sure that all the characters I am using are already pinyin-ized in the lesson pdf. Or if I'm directly answering a question that was framed using Chinese characters; but I will try to make sure that the language I use is "tuned" to the level of that person.

It is very clearly your right to study Mandarin without learning the characters, especially on a site which promises learning "on your terms". However, you will find it very difficult to avoid seeing Chinese characters here and there, and most of the time no harm whatsoever is meant to you by it, so I guess the question is whether it's worth it to be offended. With respect, learning to write Chinese characters is a big deal, but "character recognition" sort of falls comfortably somewhere between that and "pinyin-only", and while you shouldn't pay attention to any pressure to learn characters, keeping an open mind about learning to "recognize" characters may not do you any harm; it doesn't have to take a chunk of time out of your Chinese studies (unlike, say, learning to write), and depending on the individual learner, it may even help you to make sense of all those pinyin homonyms.

We all learn in different ways, I just want to put it to you that it seems fair to be a bit tolerant towards people who are trying to learn Chinese through Chinese characters, because there's nothing strange or weird or stubborn about that.

My promise to you is that if you ask a specific question anywhere on CPOD, and I attempt to answer it, you will get full pinyin from me. Take care.

Posted on: SBTG: Sun Yatsen

@wolson: What a beautiful personal story. Thank you for letting us share it.

@adamb, yes the Sun Yatsen Nanyang Memorial Hall (or whatever the correct name is) in Singapore is closed again for renovations, not 7 years after the last refurbishment. Thanks for the heads-up; it's within 2 km of my flat, in fact I drive through Balestier Road every day, and I was actually thinking of swinging by to check it out! 

Your wise comment about how Dr Sun might have reacted to his beloved China's darkest moments in the 20th century really resonated with me. Thanks.

Btw, I'm not only based in Singapore, I am Singaporean. Heh heh.

Posted on: Airplane Arrival

You're welcome!