User Comments - johnb

Posted on: Dancing in Public

I clearly remember one of my very first nights in Hangzhou, around dusk at West Lake, hundreds of couples waltzing to tinny speakers in every nook and cranny of open space. Good times.

Posted on: One-Way Street Scuffle

One of my favorite China stories is riding with a friend in his Jeep up the side of a mountain near 长白山. The road kept twisting, and every time we would get to a corner he'd lay on his horn to announce that we were coming. Most of the time there was no response, and if there was we'd just move to one side of the road and pass the oncoming car.

At one corner, though, our little Jeep let out its call, and this huge air horn "buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu" came back. My friend immediately swerved our car hard to the outside (i.e., the edge of the road, with no guardrail and a sheer drop) as this enormous truck came around the corner. Scared the 屎 out of me.

After the truck went by my friend looked at me and said, "Hm, glad we honked."

Posted on: Just Looking

Hi toniwidjaja,

Which MP3 isn't working for you? I've tested all of them, and they're all working for me.

Posted on: Utensils in the New Kitchen

Neat. All these years, I never knew how to say spatula. 铲子... I'm going to have to remember that.

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

Is it not just 搞死掉? To kill, to knock off, etc.? Not really profane, though I wouldn't want someone to 搞死 me :)

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

If you're going to dinner with Chinese friends and they're saying things you don't understand, why don't you ask them? Maybe not every word, but if you slowly add to your collection you'll figure things out sooner or later.

Honestly, cursing in Mandarin is pretty boring. It's not nearly as varied or fun as English, in my experience. Alas, no language is perfect...

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

like they do in Chinese movies

Please, do yourself a favor and watch 唐山大地震 and tell me about how standard their accents were. Or any Chinese movie, for that fact. Or any Chinese TV show. Or basically any news broadcast other than 新闻联播.

Ask a Taipei-based newscaster whether or not the speech of their Beijing-based counterparts would be considered 'standard' in Taipei. Ask the reverse. I guarantee they wouldn't think that their counterpart was speaking 'standard' Mandarin, even though, by their own definitions, they both are.

This is the sort of stuff that English speakers make fun of the French for, and for good reason. Your accusations are like an American telling a Brit that her pronunciation is incorrect. 普通话 is a constructed language. Nobody speaks it natively. Nobody. Not even your newscaster friends. I promise you I could find a 'mistake' in the pronunciation of one of your newscaster friends in the first 5 minutes of a conversation if I was trying. Of course, saying anything would be absolutely ludicrous, because it's no more a mistake than toMAEto/toMAHto.

I learned my Mandarin in the northeast, and I married a woman from there. I'd like to hear more northern accents in the podcasts too, honestly, but I'm absolutely sure that if we added 东北人 into the mix that you'd complain, too. Real Chinese people simply don't speak the way you'd like people to speak.

If you're only looking for newscaster Chinese, turn on the TV. If you're looking for Chinese as its actually spoken by real people -- people from all over the Chinese speaking world, not just those that have professional training in an artificial dialect whose adoption has been driven by intensely political processes -- then ChinesePod is a pretty good choice.

Posted on: An Introduction to Chengyu

Hehe... those are my favorite kind too! :D

Posted on: Too Many Food Allergies

My feeling is that it's short for 你今天做的羊肉不错.

Posted on: Too Many Food Allergies

So is it the virus that gives you the thick green mucus (nice image there, must say), or the hay-fever?