User Comments - cjcastor
cjcastor
Posted on: You Play Very Well
September 16, 2015, 02:56 AMCheck out the Daily Life 2 course. There are qingwen lessons on tone changes for two third tones, yi1, and bu4.
Posted on: You Play Very Well
September 15, 2015, 02:14 AMThe video is very nice, but could you put in two lines of Chinese, one in simplified and one in traditional characters? It would be appreciated.
Posted on: 300km/hour!
August 22, 2015, 06:34 AMHey, sorry veronique, I haven't been on Chinesepod in the past couple days. No, 的 is used completely differently. For 的, you really just need a lot of example sentences. I stole this one from Chinesepod's dictionary: 我要大的，藍色的. In this case, imagine you're buying a balloon and they ask you which one you want. It's already been established that you want a balloon, and the 的 fills in for 氣球 since you already know that you're talking about balloons.
In Chinese, people seem to use a lot of particles for emphasis. In the sentence above, in English, we might use tone changes and elongate the word to emphasize that it does 300 km/h (try saying it outloud). In Chinese, they often just add a particle to the end. I wouldn't worry too much about it at this point if you're confused about it, just learn the pattern so you recognize it when you hear it.
Posted on: 300km/hour!
August 19, 2015, 02:00 PMIt's used to add emphasis, or, as my dictionary puts it, in a declarative sentence it "reinforce[s] the assertion." Ne is more common in question words, which I'm guessing is what tripped you up.
Posted on: Introduce Your Name Like a Native
July 31, 2015, 02:56 AMMy English name is Carter, and I've just been using 卡特, the characters used for President Jimmy Carter's name. How would I introduce that in Chinese? Is it okay to say "like President Carter" or would he count as a celebrity? Or would it be better to just adopt a more traditional Chinese name?
Posted on: Online Bidding
May 15, 2015, 03:15 PMI've really been appreciating some of the more recent elementary lessons. They're a good way to stretch myself when I want more of a challenge, and when I want something a little easier, there's a huge backlog of older elementary lessons.
Posted on: Cell Phone Connectivity Issues
April 26, 2015, 09:07 PMMy cellphone carrier for a while was 台灣大哥大, but I've never heard 大哥大 for 手機 outside of that, maybe because it got associated with the carrier.
Posted on: You Play Very Well
October 02, 2015, 03:18 PMHey Gwilym, I noticed the new videos have both character sets. Thanks!