User Comments - bababardwan

bababardwan

Posted on: Detective Li 4: The Circus Troupe

July 13, 2011 at 6:35 AM

haha, I was trying to be ironic. But wouldn't a monkey be the circus equivalent of the butler? No, I'm definitely not psychic.

Posted on: Detective Li 4: The Circus Troupe

July 13, 2011 at 6:30 AM

哈哈大笑，精彩朋友精彩。。我供认

Posted on: Ice Cream Run

July 13, 2011 at 6:26 AM

“I wish I were a better writer to explain this more clearly”

...in any communication, even in native language I think there are times when we are unclear on exactly what someone else is saying. I find that's where the use of clarification questions come in and where giving concrete examples can be useful. Thus, when you do have time, if you do want to explain more clearly, if you could look at those bank lessons I linked to above and point out if it really is the case that none of the vocab in those lessons are useful when it comes to the real life situation. For example in the first line of that dialogue we have the words 银行 and 账户. Are you saying that these words are "never" used? Google has 542,000,000 hits for "银行" and 97,600,000 for 账户. You could argue that this is on the internet and not what is being spoken on the streets. Of course there could be some difference, perhaps a lot of hits are coming from research papers, and other formal sources, but it seems a bit of a stretch to go from those figures to "never" spoken. Just to get a feel for the numbers looking up even more common fundamental words, 谢谢 gets 1,040，000，000 hits, and 我 gets 7，960，000，000 hits.

Let's look at your 服务员 example. You said:

"Like, "fuwuyuan" or whatever. I said that in Shanghai, Hangzhou, AND Chengdu and everyone laughed, because it's NEVER used"

Google gives 服务员 126,000,000 hits. How do I reconcile this large number with your "NEVER" ? Is it 126 million on the internet and none on the streets..that is, in the restaurants? That seems very unlikely. I also don't believe CPod would teach us something that was "NEVER" used, because one of their points of difference is they are trying to bring us current language as it is spoken. That is one of their stated aims. So what to make of what you have said? Is it your pronunciation, tones that made them laugh?....I suspect this is unlikely. Is it possible that you were wrong in your conclusion that they laughed "because it is never used" and that they laughed for some other reason [your accent was cute, who knows how many other reasons there could be]...my guess is this is possible but not overly likely [ I don't know you, but it is easy for folk to jump to the wrong conclusions]. My best guess would be that it wasn't the best word choice for the situation [?class of restaurant/ demographics of clientele, who knows what other factors may have been at play], or perhaps even the region. So this is the level at which I would find what you have to say interesting and informative. What words did they think were appropriate instead and any insights as to why that word wasn't used in that situation? Otherwise what do I make of a statement that fuwuyuan is never used based on the experience of a single user? ...and more importantly is there a better universal word that I should use?...or should I say, what words are best with what situations/settings?