User Comments - bababardwan

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

"How do you use Baidu without typing in pinyin?"

....well handwriting input is one way, and I suspect possibly the easiest for the elderly who know how to write [?possibly better than the current generation...or future generation where handwriting may have less emphasis?] and who aren't so tech savvy [so may not know one of the many other input methods]:

http://www.them.pro/pinyin

"Matter or interest, where did this quote come from, sounds like a (slightly confused?) foreigner":

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/china/120807/baidu-google-search-engine-international

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

"Re Google vs Baidu I don't really know how these counts work, I don't know the counting rules. Are they affected by whether or not Chinese people use one or the other? Or do they count 'documents'/sites etc. that use the term in question? Wouldn't matter whether Chinese people use Google or not, would it? It is the source material that is being counted. It is counting the number of references to mianbaodian in documents - not the number of people that use Google or Baidu."

...good questions mate. I'm not the best person to ask, certainly no expert, but I think your comments are valid when it comes to "hits" or "results" as google terms them....don't think the search engine matters there...it is just trying to capture every mention of the term anywhere on the internet. But in the google trends that I was using, I don't think that's what it's counting at all....it seems to be counting the number of times that term was entered as a search term...so thus I strongly suspect it is limited to the particular browser...in this case the number of times the term was entered as a google search. But you need to be aware the numbers they gave are not absolute numbers....they use the number 100 for the most number of searches [per month I think] in a given period and thus every other number [month] is like a percentage of that highest number.

Posted on: Traveling on the Cheap

"why did you find this interesting?"

hehe, well the simplest answer is that I find everything interesting [or near on anyway].

I guess I was particularly interested in this word also because I could relate to it as it seemed to me that it meant thoroughly investigating your upcoming trip, making a plan of attack so to speak, and as CPod seem to have an uncanny knack of doing, it felt like it had been written for me [ of course I realise it wasn't but I've noted many a comment here on the boards about how good the timing of such and such a lesson was and I'm sure these folk had the same feeling invoked] as I have been doing a fair bit of this 攻略ing lately....and I tend to get right into it...more than just the usual travel arrangements and that also made me interested in the term. Not sure that we really have an equivalent word in English for it, and not sure how many others would take the 攻略ing to the degree that I do and so am interested in how far the Chinese take it, particularly if it is a new term, is it a new fad also. Not had a chance to have a proper listen to the whole lesson yet [been busy 攻略ing you see] so not sure just the degree this word implies myself. I was also pondering why it should be a new word [I guess the advent of the internet makes such researching much easier] and how "new" new is.....with 5000 years of history new could be the last 200 years in some contexts.....but in terms of language I would take this to mean probably no more than the last handful of years [maybe at a stretch up to 10 I guess] though I guess it depends how it's put, the context etc. Anyhow, I happened to be on google trends anyway after a discussion with bodawei about bakeries and thought it would be interesting to look up this words "trend"as Jenny had mentioned it was new.

"So it means "succeeding = owning or mastering (a word Japanese very much like to use) a certain challenge--by gathering info, getting tips, knowing the techniques and tricks, being resourceful".

I'm not listening to the lesson and don't know what it means in Mandarin. But 旅游攻略 + the English title Traveling on the Cheap makes me think it's being used in pretty much that way. Is that off, or close?"

...yeah, you're right on track and yeah you can see where the word has come from and I like an adaptation like this. The CPod definition for it is "guide, plan". Sorry, as I said, I haven't had a chance to listen to the lesson properly yet to elucidate further.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

hangon, maybe I let you off the hook too early:

“面包房四川”

yields 104,000 results

...unless of course this is all the Beijing, Shanghai folk deng deng referring to the great bakeries they toured when in Sichuan [and not the Sichuanese referring to them themselves....hehe...see it's like cat and mouse mate...I try and catch you and then let you go ;)

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

"I would probably ask for the place that SELLS bread ..　那个卖面包的地方在哪里"

oh yeah, sells...I agree..that sounds right to me too

Posted on: Which Train Station?

"In this lesson, a traveler in Shanghai is surprised to find that his taxi driver asks him which train station he wants to go to"

hen qiguai ah [very strange]...what planet's this guy from? hopefully it's portraying an American and not an Aussie, hehe ;)

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

ah, here we go:

"With nearly 80 percent of China’s search traffic, Baidu's users include geeks as well as poor people and elderly Chinese who cannot type in pinyin, China's official romanization system"

I wonder if there is regional variation too in how much google is used in China....could it be that mianbaofang isn't showing up in Sichuan because google is just not used much there?

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

ok, looks like it's pretty substantial, second only to baidu:

Google China serves a market of mainland Chinese Internet users that was estimated in July 2009 to number 338 million

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Ps I wonder what percentage of chinese users use google (cf baidu etc) and whether lower hit numbers on google could also partly be accounted for by the fact they're using chinese search engines which I presume google doesnt pick up on....or does it?

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

hey mate, you'll like this one:

Web Search Interest: 面包房. Sichuan (China), 2004 - present.

Not enough search volume to show graphs

....so 到底好像关于你的地方你原来是对的，呵呵

Interestingly, for a couple of specific regions I just looked up the trend, namely shandong and guangdong, from 2004-2012 the only interest was in 2012 [so the graph is a flat line followed by a very tall spike to 100 which makes it look like a massive increase in interest] which supports my above linked article that bread consumption is on the rise in China....so looks like it's coming to a town near you...Sichuan may be next...maybe 面包房 be on everyone's lips and you'll have the headstart on them, hehe. ;)