User Comments - henning
henning
Posted on: Relativity
March 18, 2008 at 5:37 PMacorrian, On the one hand I understand your point. On the other hand I think the CPod way of approaching this kind of expert material is quite reasonable - they present the topic from a typical layman's perspective and thereby evade the risk of being made responsible for major blunders. Just imagine a lesson dialogue where some voice actors are playing "physicists" - riddled with mistakes on a fundamental level. The price to get that sort of content water-proof is simply prohibitive. Especially if you a language teacher and have requests to cover everything from string theory and breast transplantation and motor sport. Actually changye's point is valid: Tech and science related topics are usually relatively easy - especially if the field of expertise is yours anyway. In Beijing I bought a book on Data Warehouses and was thrilled because I could basicly follow it without a dictionary. Afterwards I got over-confident and took an epic novel set in ancient China from my brother in law. It was like: "The [???] river (?) was for the [???] people like [unknown Chengyu] is to [???]. The women were [???], saddened by the [???] of the [???]." I did not even get the faintest idea what was being talked about. I just drowned in a stream of metaphors based on obscure characters, chengyus, and poetic mood vocab. And then came that gruesome Chinese 3rd grade textbook and my confidence was utterly crushed... I am acutally quite content with this lesson. I am happy to have learned vocab like 狭义 and 广义. Only that "ploy plot" seems a little bit worn out. I am willing to endure a soap opera, but why do those female characters are always playing hard-to-get? They could at least be a bit more flitatious and risqué, adding a bit more spice to it.
Posted on: Dublin
March 17, 2008 at 4:57 AMmistrjess, that would better fit the general Conversations than in a lesson comment, but the translation is: 请勿淋雨 (Courtesy of my wife who pointed out several mistakes in my own attempt to translate)
Posted on: Relativity
March 16, 2008 at 12:30 PMI just come back from a two week trip to Beijing where I kept hearing the following sentence over and over: "你儿子发音比你标准多了!" That and the fact that I am really tired now might contriubute to that strange impression that this little intro is directly targeted at me... ;) Now I will listen to the lesson which I expect to lay the groundwork for the "navigation at relativistic speed" show that I predicted as early as September 14th, 2006: http://blogs.chinesepod.com/2006/09/13/new-features-site-enhancements-2/
Posted on: Getting Nationalities Straight
March 15, 2008 at 2:53 PMnorphines, be careful, the Pinyin "r" it is actually very far from an English "j": http://www.sinosplice.com/lang/pronunciation/04/
Posted on: #41
March 15, 2008 at 12:18 AMbuckaroo, not if you have a DVD player that plays all regional codes or if you buy an extra "China" DVD player for 50€ or if you buy VCDs in China which know no such thing as a regional code. I tried this. My experience: It goes really smooth if you really know the movie already. It is rather frustrating with unknown China Wuxia movies.
Posted on: Mobile Repairmen and AZERDocMom
March 14, 2008 at 10:14 AMHi Doc, cool to hear from you and your son! Another famous name gets a voice. Having kids who grow up bilingual, I am always interested in those life-stories. I guess tones and grammar should be no problem for you, is that correct? Where did/do you acuire the Hanzi? I wish you continue to have a pleasent and exciting trip!
Posted on: 恶俗广告
March 14, 2008 at 3:19 AM老师们， 你们又证明了媒体课程不仅是你们创意性与变化性最高的级别，而且前途也是宽大的。 特别精彩。 链接一， 二，五 (暂时?) 放不了。 不过我也看过这部老太太老爷爷的广告。 第一次觉得还可以， 第30次 烦死我了。
Posted on: Buying Batteries
March 13, 2008 at 9:14 AMThat is our German "Block".
Posted on: Buying Batteries
March 13, 2008 at 8:49 AMchangye, it is the ultimate tool for tickling your tongue. I remember it to be the classical device for boring physics experiments on electrical circuits (because it is so easy to attach wires to it).
Posted on: Relativity
March 18, 2008 at 5:47 PMBy the way: String Theory is 弦理论 (chāoxiánlǐlùn), becise 弦 is string. And I am *not* a Trekkie. I just happened to have watched all shows of all series. Accidentally.