User Comments - bababardwan

Posted on: Mother's Day

zhen,

And if Connie's comment is "anecdotal evidence" I obviously don't understand what anecdotal evidence is

The way I view it,and the way I interpret what bodawei said is this:

Connie said

You can hear this sentence a lot in China. We don't view it as abusive - the tone isn't serious.

I think we all here have great respect for Connie and her opinion and would give a lot of weight to it.But regardless of who is reporting such a thing,wikipedia has one use of anecdotal evidence as:

The term is often used in contrast to scientific evidence,

No one hear seems to be denying that this sentence is heard in China. The key word in Connies statement is "lot". This has not been quantified and will evoke vastly different quantities in different peoples minds. So I think here we are contrasting anecdotal evidence with a comprehensive study of the issue with best possible data collection [which as bodawei has hinted at is still likely to be flawed]. Also there is the potential of observer bias. How representative can any one individuals experience be of the 1.4 billion Chinese?

Posted on: Mother's Day

sydcarten,

I've only just caught up with this thread and you've only just beat me to say the same thing,namely:

It doesn't matter how the speaker intended his/her statement to be taken.

What matters is how the listener interprets that statement, and how they react emotionally to it.

..well said mate.

All I can say is good on you bodawei for raising this as an important issue.I too have no doubt that in the vast majority of cases this sort of statement is said in a joking cajoling type of way with no ill intent.However I view it as a form of ignorance.I'm a big believer in trying to understand cultural differences but I think some things are just fundamental.I think children need protecting and I think it has only been in more recent times that it has been better understood the impact of such upbringings.I also think that culture is just what we've inherited in our societies from our ancestors and that that shouldn't mean that we can't modify our behaviours as we all become better enlightened over the eras.Otherwise there would be no progress and it would be acting on a presumption that there were no errors or areas that could have been improved on in the past.

Posted on: Learning English in China

maybe she misheard the English saying about having one's cake it eating it too and was out to prove us wrong by having her steak and eating cake too...was it mianfei to boot?

Posted on: Learning English in China

oh right...thanks for explaining.Can't read the hanzi at the moment but the photos make it look like it's illegal and someone's smuggling efforts have been circumvented. Reminds me of a scene from "Gorillas in the mist". So do you know what is behind this traditional belief and whether anyone still adheres to it?

Posted on: Learning English in China

thanks for satisfying my curiosity mate.

the computer I'm on at the moment can't display hanzi but it has these little boxes with the unicode numbers in them.I'm just wondering if I copy and paste these little boxes:

你好

..whether it will display properly on computers that can display hanzi. Has that worked above?

Posted on: Learning English in China

挺好的。。多谢。你怎么知道那个？

..this one bears thinking about. I get that it means the same as all these others...like you can't have your cake and eat it too. But not living in bear country here [ a koala is not a bear] it seems like a saying that doesn't come entirely intuitively.I'm envisioning salmon swimming upstream in Canada and the bear waiting to swipe as they go up a little waterfall.And then after the bear has caught the fish for you,you just go and nab it off the fish.Now you can't do that if you've lopped off his paw.Is this anywhere near the mark of the origin of this analogy? Actually I did a spot of this work myself when I was last over there:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7984238215879349622#

Posted on: Learning English in China

good one mate..thanks...I see exactly what you mean.I'll remember that one now. :)

Posted on: Haggling Like a Local

regardless of my gender

aiyou!,..do you mean you can flit back n forth between the two willy nilly ?

Posted on: Stop Speeding!

from Australia, they dont like any word they cant cut in half and add a y to

..lol,I'll pay that rj ;)

Posted on: Learning English in China

哈哈大笑，我非常喜欢这个捧腹大笑的课程。。感谢中文播客