User Comments - calicartel

Posted on: Documents, Documents, Documents

Never have to prove that you are single? Hey, what about when you want to get married? Do'nt you think they would want to know you haven't already a spouse tucked away somewhere?

Posted on: 混合动力车

3rd expansion sentence: 小区隔三岔五地停电"小区" is rendered by "small apartment complexes ...". I wonder whether this is not somewhat misleading, in the sense that 小区 would be a housing estate (apartment complex), period. But not necessarily a small one, in spite of the "小".

The 小区's one gets in Google images are huge!

What the sentence would be complaining about then is not that small complexes (as opposed to big ones) have power cut problems, but rather that apartment complexes in general face that problem (eg because of a single-point connection to the grid for hundreds of apartments).

Posted on: 混合动力车

I put the proposal forward when CP did an online survey a couple of years ago. Few podders voted for it though.

Yet a relaxed voice simply talking ("telling") about a particular topic would be nice for a change, all the more so since the podcast itself is also more of a dialogue. Quite apart from the absurdity of shoehorning any abstract or cultural topic into the dialogue format ("Hey Heisenberg, what about trying to define at the same time the location and the mass of the electron? What about that he?" - "No way my dear Schroedinger, you can't. I did tell you about the uncertainly principle"), I find I have great difficulties of even beginning to understand the Headlines in Chinese, and I suspect this has to do with the absence of such speech in CP. I fare better as soon as someone on the News gets interviewed because then I'm back into dialogue territory.

Posted on: 混合动力车

Do you think so? Surely, lessons (all the more so advanced lessons) should be more than cheat sheets for going shopping or making small talk. The aim is to learn Chinese by having everyday vocab covered. Alternative energies and non conventional vehicles are an everyday topic. The only limitation, IMHO, is the dialogue format. Some advanced topics would be better covered using non dialogue.

Posted on: 婚前恐惧症

婚前恐惧症 = premarital blues

Posted on: Renting an Apartment through an Agent

I think the very last expansion sentence (他家装修得很豪) is translated inaccurately as "The renovation in this place is very luxurious.". It should read "his place".

Posted on: Leaky Pipes and Faucets

I remember reading something to the effect that pipe diameter was not the reason. It had to to with the ability of sceptic tanks to degrade paper.

Posted on: 算命

Slightly off topic (but not too much): I wish CP would use a smaller font for the pinyin and the English translation on PDF transcripts. More would fit on a single page. Of course I don't know whether this is technically easy to do. I also suggested some months ago that PDF pages should be numbered. The proposal was welcomed by someone from the CP team but it was never implemented.

Posted on: Organic Food

Gosh that's right. I'd lost sight of that. The 起 is part of the preceding expression! This kind of reading mistake (offset decoding frame) is a common pitfall in Chinese because speech is not divided into words. Thanks!

Posted on: Organic Food

12th expansion sentence: 就算我买得起车 (even if I bought a car). Isn't 汽车 the correct spelling for "car, automobile"?