User Comments - auntie68

Posted on: Airplane Arrival

Hi shuaibao, what does your dictionary have to say about "本“ ？ I would like to give you a complete explanation, but it's not easy to explain (even after looking at the definitions in two of my own dictionaries!).

Still, here goes:

本 (ben3) is a somewhat formal word, a particle inherited from Classical Chinese, but still widely used in more formal modern Chinese. It means "this very", "this current", "this present", or even, "this our" (bad English, but may help to convey the sense of 本). It is like a 这 which identifies the subject -- here, 飞机 -- even more closely with the speaker and the people she/he is addressing.

Eg. 本行 (ben3hang2) = "this profession"/ "this line"

本文 (ben3wen2) = "this article／ commentary"

本人 (ben3ren2) = "I myself" / "in person"

Eg. 必须你本人来。

I strongly recommend looking this one up, if only for the examples in your dictionary. You'll see this all the time.

HTH

Posted on: SBTG: Sun Yatsen

Hi. Thank you so much, CPOD, for doing a lesson on a man who -- to this day -- is very much revered as an immortal hero by overseas Chinese. In the hearts and minds of the overseas Chinese, Sun Yatsen is truly "the Father of China".

With his fluent English, and his passionate, inclusive vision for China, he literally captured the hearts of the overseas Chinese during his frequent fund-raising trips to Southeast Asia (the Chinese of 南洋 nen2yang2) in the years leading up to 1911.

I understand that he made no fewer than 8 trips to Singapore during the 11 years leading up to fall of the Qing Dynasty, raising substantial sums of money from the overseas Chinese, many of whom were living in colonies or protectorates, as subjects of colonial rulers, and who themselves were dreaming of liberty and independence.

All over Southeast Asia, there are well-preserved houses, museums, "halls" and gazetted villas, connected in some way with Dr Sun's fundraising travels, which places have at least the same meaning in the overseas Chinese heart, as any "George Washington slept here" or "Ernest Hemingway Drank in This Bar" places elsewhere.

This is only my personal opinion, but I think that the legacy of Dr Sun Yatsen has an everlasting appeal which helped the overseas Chinese people to weather the many painful political stresses of the 20th century, when their loyalties always seemed to be tested by host governments who supported one camp (eg. the Kuomintang camp or the PRC camp) strongly over the other. I believe that what Dr Sun fought for all his life was China.

Again, thank you.

Posted on: Airplane Arrival

Hello pinkjeans. The difference between 本地 and 当地 is dealt with pretty nicely in the banter for the Intermediate lesson "Finding Live Music"; about 4 minutes into the podcast:

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/finding-live-music

HTH! 

Posted on: Hiking

Amen. I give you the last word, gladly!

Posted on: Hiking

P/s: Mircea Moldovan, you do know that 山 in Chinese often means "hill", don't you?

Posted on: Hiking

I'm afraid I have to disagree with Prof Mircea Moldovan here. Btw, English is my first language. And I'm a heritage speaker of Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin).

In my (humble) opinion, "hiking" is a very appropriate word to describe what the Chinese traditionally refer to as "爬山“. When Chinese think of "爬山”, they're thinking of hiking in the hills, it's not the kind of activity that would involve crampons, pitons, and all kinds of special tethers.

I've heard friends -- both Mainland and Hong Konger friends -- talking excitedly about their plans to "爬山" in the New Territories of HK on a Sunday after... I'm quite sure that there aren't any mountains there. Your definition of "hiking" is one which I've come across maybe TWICE in my life, is an extremely formal and stiff term.

I can't help feeling that it was unfair of you to launch this pedantic (no other word for it) attack on Jenny Zhu's English with gaps like this in your knowledge of English and Chinese, even though I know that you weren't out to "draw blood" (at least, I hope it wasn't). Was it really worth it "scoring" this "point"? Learning foreign languages is a very deep process which challenges what we think/ assume/ believe we know, it's probably safer to be slow, rather than quick, to jump on some language point where we're not a native speaker of BOTH languages.

Oh well, peace --

auntie68

Posted on: Airplane Arrival

Oops, I just caught jennyzhu's very gracious soothing response to my grumpy post. 我真的不好意思 ！Jenny, everything that you guys are doing for us is deeply appreciated, always will be. Nobody imagines that you and the team aren't all going through far more pain and suffering than even what we users are complaining about daily now since V4. 辛苦你们。And that knowledge is no comfort to anybody with a decent heart. We complain a lot, but we're with you, if you can believe it. 加油！

Posted on: Pageant Final Episode

Dear rich, if there is a list somewhere, I haven't been able to find it! The "search" function is pretty useless as "Pageant" throws up a few doubles in the lesson results.

I discovered this the hard way last week. In the end I just gave up and found the lessons manually (CPOD! how could you make us do this!!!) using my iTunes browser. As far as I can tell, there are 8 lessons before this:

628, 641, 656,

677, 697, 797,

837, 881.

Good luck. I wasted time because I was under the impression that "Lesson Sets" might be the way to go. Turns out that LS seems to be for Premium users; it has to do with the bookmarking function. Totally useless for a mere Basic Subscriber like me. What would be really useful, IMHO, is a better way of looking for lesson sets using some kind of "lesson search" function, eg. a simple menu of searches pre-defined by CPOD with a view to throwing up a complete lesson list for any of their more popular "series".

But of course searching by lesson has been replaced by the glossary search, which suffers badly from poor tagging. Aiya...

Posted on: SBTG: Confucius

Hello changye. I agree with your translation of 杀鸡焉用牛刀, thanks. Just to be complicated, but in a friendly way, my personal theory was: 杀鸡的时候，(偏)用牛刀？I don't believe it contradicts your translation.

To be honest, I think I was thrown by the explanation, given in the "banter", that 焉 always comes at the sentence/phrase, so I tried looking at it as 杀鸡焉 用牛刀 but it didn't feel right. Now I think I must have heard it wrong... silly me. Thanks!

Posted on: 理想女人

Yes, clay is right. "Beloved" can also mean, in English, "the one who is loved by me". But it's quite a "literary" word, eg in a phrase like "Across the river my Beloved waits for me...". Good on clay for being so cultured...