User Comments - light487

Posted on: Triumph of the Rat

Hrmm.. my dictionary (brain) needs a faster processing time for Intermediate.. :) I am surpirsed though that by watching the body language and gestures, and knowing some of the words being spoken, that I am able to understand the meaning.

Like the running bit.. I only recognised the word "kuài" 快 but from the gestures I could understand that she was saying "run faster! run faster!".. I checked the PDF and sure enough "pǎo" 跑 means to to-run/to-escape.

I'm trying to work out a way to learn that is going to benefit me more for when I am having this experience of not really understanding everything I am hearing..

Posted on: Chinatomy: Iconic Tunes and Hairy Crabs

Are there any chinese songs that would be the Chinese equavilant of "The Sound of Music", where everyone groans in (almost) pain when they hear it?

Posted on: Introducing the Managers

Hehe... after I deleted that part of my post, I obviously wrote the wrong word in my fix. I did mean the measure word "wei4".. not mei4.. sorry for the confusion.

Posted on: Last and Next

A common one that I use all the time is "See you next time".. this is of course xiàcì to mean "next time" and then add on jiàn to mean "to see".. So altogether we end up with:

下次见
xiàcì jiàn

Oh.. and Lego Batman is an awesome game! :)

Posted on: Hungry Traveler: Sichuan

Hehe.. I alway dine at the Sichuan restaurant near my work, every 2nd thursday. I also just took some people who were staying with me there last week too. We had some sort of braised chicken thing in a big pot.. I am bad with the names of dishes.. hehe.. and we also had shark fin hot and sour soup. Both dishes were wonderful.

The heat of Sichuan dishes is just below my maximum threshhold for spicey food, so it's perfect. Although I do need to pick out those tiny, dark red chillis.. they are deadly! :)

Posted on: Introducing the Managers

The girl speaks VERY fast in this dialogue but the guys speak normal speed. Which is the true "normal" speed here? I now read through the PDF dialogue first before listening to the audio and try to pronounce everything in an evenly flowing way and then when I listen to the dialogue I am always surprised at how much faster it is. The guys speak a little quicker than I did it but not as fast as the girl did it.

One thing I am really having a lot of trouble with now that I have a decent handle on the tones (though still far from perfect) is where to put pauses/breaths. If I just say everything together it sounds wrong; I notice there seem to be little pauses after 3rd tones a lot of the time but other than that, I find it difficult to automtically add these little pauses myself, may be this could be handled in a Qing Wen but I'm not sure how you would put it in a decent enough context to make it useful. For example:

wǒ xiān gěi dàjiā (slight pause) jièshào yīxià.

[Hrmm.. I must have accidentally deleted the comment I made in the middle here. ]

I was asking if the measure word mèi is used often when refering to people. I have only seen this measure word used when talking about family, and gè used when talking about people in general, for example měigèrén. Is this because the context was not clear enough to use the generic measure word? Or is there something else here that I am missing?

About the last line of dialogue: Is it uncommon, therefore, to use the word qǐng at the start of a sentence like that? Or does the particle ba at the end kind of denote that already? That is:

qǐng dàjiā kuài zuò ba!

Thanks for putting up with my long-winded questions and comments. :)

Ha Ha.. Love the Karaoke thing at the end of this lesson. :p

Posted on: Clearing the Table

hrmm.. there's no "ma" question particle on the end of the first one.. so it's not a question.. but I hardly ever see Ji used in a question about "how many".. it is always DouShao..

Posted on: Chinglish in Reverse and University Culture

I accidentally Chinglished on the weekend. I was chatting on MSN to a Chinese friend about the guests I have staying with me this week (they are from Taiwan btw).. and she asked me if they were friends of mine..

What I was typing should have been: "they are not my good friends" but as I was typing, I wasn't really paying a attention and what I actually typed was "they are not my good pengyous".. :) hehe.. we laughed a bit over that.. but the odd thing is that I was actualy thinking of how to say it in Chinese as I was writing it.. so that is why it came out like that. :)

Posted on: Party Time at ChinesePod

This is the first one I can find:

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/intro-1-good-morning

I'm not sure if it is the first first.. but it is marked with the filename of A0001.

Posted on: Dirty Little Hands

Listening to this lesson makes me realise where I am at with my chinese language ability. I can hear a bunch of words that I recognise but not enough to understand immediately what is being said. Having said that though, I can identify which words mean what as soon as the first translation is done. So I think I am at the upper beginner level at this point.

I guess I am just now starting to understand the language.. I may not understand every word but I am starting to understand it as a whole and how the bits and pieces go together.. not that I can totally reproduce it.. just that I am getting a grasp of it now.

At the end of the podcast.. who is that speaking? It sounds a lot like Aric..?