User Comments - bodawei

Posted on: Visiting the Hospital with a Fever

@ huan9

What do Chinese doctors look for when they test blood?  

It would depend on the symptoms presenting, but I can give you the range of tests in a recent health exam I had:  

Chinese blood test - 血常规 xue4chang2gui1 (blood routine) from a health examination

(Range of acceptable values and units)

I think that in the West doctors commonly order many more tests - one reason why our health system is much more expensive.  

Posted on: Saying Goodbye at the Airport

Thanks John, I take the point that Chinese verbs don't have a past tense. I tried to get around it by saying that the 了 'puts the action in the past tense', rather than saying that the 了 makes the verb past tense. If I said that the 了 puts the action in the past, would that be incorrect? 不要 the word 'tense'?

Posted on: Saying Goodbye at the Airport

The 了 le here puts the action in the past tense.

Posted on: Office Lunch Options

Hi Lujiaojie

How did you get to use tone marks in this comment window? Do you do it elsewhere and paste it in?

Posted on: Chinese names, Avatar and Meet-ups

So in your experience it means 'unreliable'? Does it mean anything else? Metaphorically I mean.

Posted on: Chinese names, Avatar and Meet-ups

I think that this 'flakey' is colloquial usage - and, oh dear, I suspect that it is used differently in different forms of English. Maybe it is Shanghai English? :-) Thinking about it, I would associate 'flakey' with someone being crazy or eccentric rather than unreliable, but unreliable is probably okay. I would also accept that it could be a word with multiple readings. It is a word that hasn't settled yet, in a lexical sense.

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

Changye was doing a 'hypothetical' - thought experiments are allowed even in China. :-)

Seriously I think that you are underestimating the ambiguity problem - there is a significant problem reading characters, and a much greater problem reading pinyin. Ever wonder why there are essentially no crosswords in Chinese? Too hard.

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

I get you, you are quite right. But that must come later. 现在他们有思想平的课， 对不对？

There were no computers in this school, only wobbly desks. (There is a funny thing in Chinese classrooms that three students must sit on a seat designed for two. Incredibly, even at university they do this! All the friends like to sit together.)

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

My question is only about written communication of course. I guess I am stating the obvious when I say that to read 'pinyin' is exceedingly difficult because of ambiguity. If you line up pinyin and hanzi, hanzi is easier to comprehend. (I think that is the point Changye is making elsewhere.)

Incidentally i never found pinyin 'easier' when first learning Chinese. I never saw it without characters, and if I had seen it by itself it would have made little sense. Correct? Which is why Chinese is not taught by showing people pinyin alone (or I don't think it is, is it?)

Which brings us back to Dungan. Maybe it is less rich than Standard Chinese in the written form, because of being limited to a kind of pinyin?

Or are you saying that Dungan speakers experience none of the difficulties we see trying to read pinyin in isolation from characters? In which case they must compensate somehow for the ambiguities that arise?

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

I asked them for the hanzi because I didn't know all the characters. (I kind of expected them to automatically write both at this stage of their education.)

They laboured over it - it seemed to be a real effort to remember the pinyin.

They made some errors with the ones I know.

So I concluded that they are less fluent in pinyin than hanzi.