User Comments - henning

Posted on: Rome

changye, John, wxgcathy,
thanks for this illuminating discussion. It really helped me grasp the concepts, their differences, and their background. I myself love (passively consuming) those nitpicky arguments.

Posted on: Saved by the Gong: Chemistry

Thanks!

Now I can officially mark this lesson off as "worked through" :)

Posted on: Party Time at ChinesePod

The first show was "Basic Greetings" (published on the 5th of September 2005). It was 13:39 min in length.

Ken says at 00:20:

"Now, today's lesson is the first in what we hope will be many, many lessons in spoken Chinese - brought to you through daily podcasts and supplemented with the website, the exercises, transcripts, blogs and other things on chinesepod.com. So Chinesepod is a new way to learn language and we hope that you stay with us and try it out."

Then comes an introduction to the level system with the message that after 20-30 Newbies lessons you can move to Elementary.

Jenny is introduced at about 02:00 with her English and Chinese name.

Here is the dialogue - directly copied from the old PDF (!) as downloaded on the 10th of April 2006. It is read 3 times by Jenny and Ken.

菜鸟1 Basic Greetings
A： 你好吗?
Nǐ hǎo ma?
How are you?
B： (我)很好，谢谢。
Wǒ hěn hǎo , xiè xie .
Very well, thank you / Fine.
A： 你是中国人吗？
Nǐ shì zhōng guó rén ma ?
Are you Chinese?
B： 不是,我是美国人。
Bú shì , wǒ shì měi guó rén .
No, I’m American.

After the breakdown of the dialogue sentence by sentence some basic and supplementary vocab is presented: 我，你，他，我们，你们，他们， 是， 是的， 很好，谢谢

Towards the end, Ken promises us:

And we will have you speaking Chinese in no-time

:)

Posted on: Numbers in Chinese

With the recent financial crisis large numbers are popping up everywhere. And it is complicated as it is in the West alone with the differences between the "long scale" (million-> milliard-> billion-> billard-> trillion-> trillard) and its variants that is used in the Europe and the "short scale" that dominates the American continent and Australia (million-> billion-> trillion-> quadrillion-> qintillion-> sextillion)

So a trillion in Chinese can either be
一万亿 or
一百亿亿
depending on where you are coming from.

I read in the German Wikipedia that Scrooge McDuck's assets exceed (in German) a "phantastilliard" duckburg dollars and that is 1000 "phantastillions". Supposidly each fantastillion is 10^81. This means nothing less that Scrooge posseses 一万亿亿亿亿亿亿亿亿亿亿 dollars!

Better stick with exponents. Need to explain those in the next Qing Wen

:)

Posted on: The Boy That Cried Wolf

As much as I like the established podcast format: It is refreshing to see that you guys went back to experimenting. :)

You covered Newbie and Ele with video...now I am really curious how you will do more Advanced stuff.

And what about Video-QWs? Probably the only way to tackle the 的得地-conundrum.

Posted on: The Boy That Cried Wolf

xuchen,

结果 can either be used as a noun ("result") or as a conjunction (连词). In the latter case it is used rather broadly to describe all sorts of outcomes - up to a rather blurry "eventually". My Dictionary gives the following definition for the 连-version:

表示因果关系。 用在复句的后一个分句， 表示前一个分句中所说的情况最后出现了什么结果。

• 刻苦， 结果考上了一所著名的大学。
• 双方经过讨论，结果还是甲方的意见被接受了
• 他准备了半年， 结果还是没成功。
• 我和他一起准备研究生的考试，结果，他考上了， 我没考上。

This is also discussed in the lesson "Jizhou Mental Breakdown".

Posted on: Transliteration into Chinese and the Long Pinky Fingernail

老鸭 is the family name.

Scrooge McDuck = 史高治·麦克老鸭

Posted on: Transliteration into Chinese and the Long Pinky Fingernail

tvan,

I think only the 唐 is donald, 老 is an old way of addressing (my wife sometimes jokingly calls me 老巴).

Alternative: The 老 might also be chosen for reasons of symmetry with 米老鼠. The second character in a Chinese name is often kept identical across one family.

Posted on: Clearing the Table

wande,
lay the table = 摆桌子 (bǎi zhuōzi)

Posted on: Asking for Change

china4me,
the 们 makes the 你 plural. The sentence addresses two or more persons.