User Comments - light487
light487
Posted on: Are You Tired?
April 4, 2008 at 12:01 PMThis is my first "Paid Subscriber" lesson! :) wooot! :)
Posted on: Lesson
March 26, 2008 at 11:10 AMHas anyone got a "picture" of the tones? I am a visual learner.. for example I think of the tones like this: The 1st tone seems to be a short straight horizontal stroke; the 2nd tone seems to be a short curve that starts low and ends higher the starting point; the 3rd tone seem to be a longer curve that starts low and ends about the same height as the starting point. also this tone has the feeling of a thicker brush stroke at the start and a thinner brush stroke at the end; the 4th tone seems like a short diagonal stroke going from low to high, very quickly. Seeing them visually would make a huge difference to the way I perceive their sounds.
Posted on: Where are you from?
March 25, 2008 at 10:47 AMOn the original lesson with the same name: chinesepod_A0008pb.mp3 There is mention of a word that sound like "boo" using what I think is tone 4.. I am very new so I might be wrong.. anyway, Jenny and Ken say that this word roughly means "not". The example they use is: "ni hao boo hao" meaning "are you good/not good?" instead of "ni hao ma" meaning "are you good?" I'm just wondering why and in what context these would be used?
Posted on: Do you like China?
March 25, 2008 at 4:37 AMThe dialogue makes me laugh a lot.. they are good presenters and make it seem easy to understand and fun to learn. I am enjoying my first days of learning immensely. Should I just keep going through the lessons in order? or are there some fundamental/foundation lessons that will help me out more?
Posted on: Good Morning!
March 25, 2008 at 2:26 AMIn a later lesson, I forget which one now, the topic dicusses that "ni hao ma?" is not commonly used because the ma? is implied within the context of meeting of the two people and the relationship they already have with each other... I wonder how much of this will occur as I begin to learn Mandarin? I know that I first need to learn the the basics and proper grammar to have a good foundation before learning truisms and common uses but I also don't want to learn bad habits like this, and sound like a tourist.. how can avoid this from happening?
Posted on: Are You Tired?
April 4, 2008 at 12:37 PMWell.. that was a really good lesson. I laughed a few times, which is always good. I got an overall average 90% on the exercises. I made some more connections in my internal-dialogue neural network of how everything pieces together.. Still extremely overwhelmed by the Chinese Characters, so I have to stay within the realms of pinyin for now.. Not sure how I will ever overcome that hurdle.. May be the fact that the expansion section forces me to hover my mouse over the characters to see the pinyin will slowly train me in seeing the pinyin that underlies the Characters... only time will tell. My only suggestion would be to have the opening dialogue at 3 speeds.. one nice and slow, one a at medium speed where associated particles are sounded closer together and once where everything is said at fluent speech speed. It seemed like everything was at medium to fast speed.