User Comments - auntie68

Posted on: Seoul

Boran, it's quite a subtle difference. 大家 tends to be more inclusive, eg., "everybody". 大家会帮你的。da4jia1 hui4 bang1 ni3 de = "We'll all help you".

人家 often conveys a sense of "people", in a very general abstract sense. Eg. 人家会笑你的! ren2jia1 hui4 xiao4 ni3de! = "People will laugh at you!"

HTH

Posted on: Seoul

I have to agree 100% with uncle changye. On my first business trip to Seoul, I was surprised to discover a small bottle of "Hangover Remedy (Liver Tonic)" amongst the overpriced offerings in my minibar at the Shilla Hotel.

I'm a really good drinker (oops...), but my first serious round of "business socializing" with my Korean hosts had me rummaging desperately in the minibar for that little bottle, the morning after... 

Koreans are charming drinkers. A number of business associates told me that they "rub" ("love") me, before sliding under the table.

I managed not to pass out, but my "designated intern" -- a Seoul National University graduate, wow! --, who was not allowed to drink a lot because he was supposed to get me home alive, had to rescue this Auntie from stepping out into the busy traffic and trying to hail an enormous goods truck which I had mistaken for... a taxi.

The Koreans were such good people that they tried to keep this nugget from me, but I was lucid enough to piece it together myself, eventually. Yikes.

Posted on: The New Site and the Guided Plan

Hi light487/ Luke, thanks for the review, which contained tons of useful and interesting information!

May you get a lot of value out of the "Guided". I hope you will continue to post good questions here, even though you now have a teacher to answer your questions personally. So that we can keep learning...

Posted on: The New Site and the Guided Plan

Hi light487/ Luke. This is exciting! I hope you'll feel brave enough to share (the gist of) your assessment with us, so that we can cheer for you and cheer you on!

Posted on: SBTG: Confucius

Hello CPOD academic team, everybody. I seem to recall an expression learned in school (so many years ago!): - 杀鸡焉用牛刀－ but my memory could be, no probably IS, defective. That usage doesn't seem to fit in with the CPOD explanation. Thanks so much for being my teachers! And if my memory is wrong, the sooner I am corrected, the better!

Posted on: 理想女人

You're a brave man, changye, to include that second phrase (ie. 女人变坏才有钱)... Hee hee.

Posted on: Barbecuing

@cassielin: Thanks for teaching me 每隔一... ! And for giving me a guest star role in your example!

@changye: 3 cheers for hatsu ! No, no, please change my order to hatsu + at least one ice-cold can of Kirin beer... Mmm.

Posted on: Barbecuing

Congratulations, garry!

And thank you, uncle changye, for making me laugh. Btw, I like yakitori with chicken hearts, but I don't know whether that is authentic yakitori (or if it is something that a real Japanese wouldn't recognize!).

Posted on: 易中天看“三顾茅庐”

Hi tsack. For what it's worth, I don't have any trouble viewing the vocab on the online version of the pdf (straight off this page); I'm using Mac + Leopard + Safari. Maybe this can help the techs to help you.

@light487, user28880: It took me almost exactly a year to get comfortable with "Advanced".

Although I am doing okay without English subtitles now, I do think that my progress was, in fact, slowed down unnecessarily by the fact that the more advanced pdfs (especially the earlier ones, from say one year ago) did not offer enough contextual information for me to make an intelligent guess about the language. 

Eg. With many of these "Advanced" lessons, I had no idea what the topic was because I didn't recognize any of the proper nouns in Chinese (eg. Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, "Lust Caution", the "dumb people talkshow" etc).

I asked for proper nouns to be given their common English versions, at least in the Supplementary Vocab. Where CPOD did so, I saved perhaps half the time I would have wasted on that lesson trying to guess something that could not have been guessed no matter how strong my Mandarin skills were. And where they forget, or chose not to -- eg. the recent kungfu lesson --, nearly half of the time I spent on that lesson was wasted on trying to figure out who those people were.

Another thing which is weak in the more advanced pdfs is definitions -- in English or Chinese, it doesn't matter to me -- of slang etc which I will never be able to find in the dictionaries I own. And unlike the proper nouns, I can't simply google them (if I can be bothered) in order to try and get a clue.

In that context, I don't think it can do any harm to have a loose (not literal) English translation even in the more advanced pdfs. Like you, I've often found myself simply wanting to check if my own hard-earned, hard-googled guess is more or less correct. This English translation can be kept apart from the Chinese and pinyin text, so that anybody who doesn't like it doesn't have to look at it.

Posted on: Getting Dressed

Thanks Amber!