User Comments - ideotek

Posted on: Chinese Fruits

I'm having trouble seeing point d).

Are you saying you can't use 起来 qilai for "lowered" the flag? or is it simply "HAS lowered the flag" and the same as point b)?

Are the meanings for "raise children" or "raise a temperature" not upward motions of their respected verbs + qilai?

Or are there different verbs for these concepts?

Also: doesn't "hear" or have more of an impression made than "listen" except when you use "have heard" or "have listened"?

Posted on: Colors

I had the best luck with a fountain pen, hard paper and the nciku.com dictionary.

http://www.nciku.com/

Find the single character and there's a pop-up window with a very clear animation of stroke order and direction.

johan bjorksten has a nice book with some more background and tips.

Then it's just practice, practice and some practice.

Posted on: Have you eaten?

Thanks for the confirmation, Jason.

Posted on: Have you eaten?

In the Expansion this 他们也去吗? (ni men ye qu ma?) is translated to past tense: Did they go?

Shouldn't there be a 了 in there? If not how do you say: Do they (usually) go?  ...say to the movies or something?

Posted on: Who is that?

Yes, I was looking for "girl" but girlfriend came out. Happens sometimes to me.

So let's try it： together nvhair gets me 女孩日 - last character is wrong.

separately: nv hai r 女 亥 日

AHA! for nü I type nv

and that 'r' on the end is actually 'er'! 女孩儿

I guess this must be a newbie thing. Thanks for the help!

Posted on: Who is that?

Anybody know how to get a mac to produce the characters for nuhair (girlfriend) in pinyin? It doesn't seem to give me the correct ones. I had to cut and paste in the exercises so I wouldn't lose the point! :)

Thanks.

Posted on: Who is that?

Yea, I realized that's going to take a little getting used to. It was just starting to get suspicious. Thanks for saying it!

Posted on: Skritter and CPod Partners

I'm on a desktop with a mouse and Skritter doesn't really give me much satisfaction with character 'writing' practice. It is good for recognition, but I get that from the flash cards and the matching games, too.

I also don't understand the purpose of learning to write characters with a mouse, or even a pen pad or on an iphone screen.

When I want to practice a character, I use graph paper and the http://www.nciku.com/ dictionary. There's an option to see the stroke order and direction which does a pretty good job as far as I can tell. It's been great complement to cPod.

I've gotten confident enough to try characters that I've never seen written before. It's also helped me 'see' characters in the small font, without having to roll over each to count crossbars or see which lines are connected to which.

Writing on paper gets my eyes off the computer, and it's not easy to make a balanced character. This is really magic but skritter can't get me close to it. As a flash designer, I can't imagine making an app better for writing practice than pen and paper.

To anyone like me, who got hooked on chinese just trying to learn a few characters, I highly recommend the http://www.nciku.com/ dictionary. (I'm on my third notebook and fifth ink cartridge in just six weeks!)