User Comments - changbiyuan

Posted on: What will it be?

That's what I meant by "redirects." Maybe this lesson was intended as a rewrite but I think the original has a use on its own, and it still has its own separate audio and PDF files. As such they should be kept correct, since as I said, people going from the beginning (like me) will come across it pretty early on and might want to learn the writing for it.

Posted on: What will it be?

Yes, I'm aware they're two separate lessons. The purpose of my last post was to clarify for Amber that the PDF correction suggestions I made before were for "What'll It Be" rather than this lesson, but I can't post on the discussion for that lesson because it's inaccessible.

What is it that "opens fine" for you? Probably the audio, right? I can open that too. But I can't get to the discussion. (I know it's a three-year-old dialogue, but that just means it'll be encountered that much sooner by those who might be working through the lessons chronologically.)

Posted on: What will it be?

Haha... You sound so Chinese adding "a little confused" to the end of what you say.

But anyway, 哎呀! The website is so screwed up for this lesson! Or rather, for a lesson with a very similar name from Remembrance Day 2005. It's "What'll It Be" and it shows up in the second-last page of Newbie lessons. But if I try to get to the lesson page for that one, it redirects here! What gives?

(Worse, if I do a search for "what'll it be" and click on the result, I get a really ugly error page.)

Posted on: Changes on ChinesePod

One suggestion that might help not scare too many new people away now:

If I try to listen to a lesson above Newbie when I'm browsing the website as a guest, I get the popup message "This is premium content. Consider updating to premium..." It's a bit overly intimidating: "premium" doesn't even mean anything, does it? Especially when the lessons themselves are just Basic-level subscription content.

The message should really be rephrased somehow to indicate that most of these restricted things only require a pretty cheap subscription.

Posted on: What will it be?

It looks to me like the Simplified PDF doesn't have 咕咾肉 correct in either the dialog itself or in the vocabulary. It's missing the 咾. Speaking of that dish, when I was in the north (长春 and then 呼和浩特) I never saw anything going by that name but there was a "guo bao rou." (I can't remember how it was written.) Are they the same dish? (It was the closest thing I could find to the sweet and sour pork at restaurants in Vancouver.) Oddly enough Changchun and Hohhot both had "guo bao rou" but it was quite different between them.

Posted on: Two words for '2'

Here's a weird thing that I came across living in Changchun. Perhaps it's the same in other places in Dongbei. Anyway, not mentioned in this lesson is that 两 is also a measure word itself, being a unit of weight—one tenth of a 斤 (jīn). In particular when you order rice in most restaurants there, they ask whether you want a large (4两) or small (2两) bowl. In the latter case you don't say 两两, I suppose because it would sound a little silly, so you get to break one of the rules of this lesson, and say 二两.