User Comments - light487

Posted on: I'm not Chinese

I once mistook a non-Chinese person as Chinese in a Chinese restaurant and decided to try some of my new found mandarin skills on him. I was immediately berated by the offended waiter who obviously was more proud of his non-Chinese heritage than his job at making me feel welcome in the restaurant. I have been scared of making a similar mistake ever since then, so I don't use my mandarin skills as much as I would like to. All I said was 谢谢.. not like I attempted to have a conversation with the guy.. *sigh*.

Posted on: I Want This

Hrmm interesting lesson.. I actually understood the dialogue on the second time through although I did almost misunderstand duìbuqǐ, for some reason I confuse this with bùzhīdào but because I knew the context, I knew it couldn't have been correct so the second time through I understood.

When I go to a Chinese restaurant, should I be trying to say all the words of the dishes? Or just use simple phrases like this? I don't want to seem like an idiot.. :) I always feel dumb when I try to speak mandarin in the real world.. like I am speaking it just for the sake of it.. which I am, so I can learn.. but yeh.. I always get embaressed before I even utter a single syllable.

Posted on: The My Minefield

Great lesson guys, really one of the best Qing Wen's you have done to date. So..

我的吉他。　我的音乐。　我喜欢表演我的吉他。

These are all correct, yes? The second one, "My Music".. in the context of me playing my own music, it would be ok to use 我的？ But if I had MP3 music on my iPOD.. I would say: 我喜欢我音乐 / 我喜欢听我音乐？

Posted on: What size?

This lesson brings up an interesting point of reference for lessons. There's a lot of lessons showing how native speakers interact with each other and that is great because it gives us non-natives an insight into how the language is spoken between native speakers. I'd also like to see the point of reference from where there are non-native speakers interacting with native speakers.

Nice simple but effective lesson on asking sizes though.

Posted on: 会 (Huì) and 能 (Néng) Face-off

So you can (hui) walk into a bar and can (hui) drink a lot.. and then when you are sober again you can (neng) walk home.. :)

Posted on: Caught in the Act

I was going to make the same comment as agentchuck:

"I did find the boss's phrase 对不起 interesting because of how she used the tone of her voice.  Because Chinese is already a tonal language, I don't know how to add inflections to words.  It's complicated to still make the right tones, but to add an additional inflection to what you're saying.  Can you do it in a similar way to English for incredulity, sarcasm, questioning, etc.?"

As I am constantly trying to hit the right tones in this tonally complex language, I often find myself holding back on English-western type tones, such as the indignant tone used here by the lao-ban. I often accidentally make a western rising tone when forming a sentence..

It's not confusing by any means, I can certainly hear the Chinese tones, as well as the western tones but I am curious, as agentchuck is, on how to use this in my own language practise.. so I don't end up sounding like a robot repeating phrases.

Posted on: Morning at the Office

eruworld - Check out the pronunciation guide here:

http://chinesepod.com/resources/pronunciation/section/5

Pretty much all words containing the 'e' are pronounced with an 'uh' sound.. not all of them of course but enough of them to make it a general rule to remember when reading pinyin.

Posted on: Morning at the Office

Yeh, I know.. but when I first started I was very put off by these types of conversation posts. I am just saying that if you can write 汉字 then there is no reason why you can't add the pīnyīn in for the "newbie" lessons.

As a community, we all share our knowledge and help one another to learn. One of these things should also be to make sure the non-native speakers who are at this level, should feel comfortable in learning the language.

I know that some people come to cPOD more to learn English than to learn Mandarin but the central point of the site is the learning of Mandarin...

I wouldn't want a comments policy either..

Posted on: Morning at the Office

This comes up every now and again, whenever people post comments in all 汉字. If possible, can you please keep the Hanzi to a minimum in the Newbie lessons, or include the pīnyīn to go with it? I know that learning the characters is very important but at this level, the important thing is the exposure to very basic things.. the music of the language, the tones, the way things go together.

Thanks for you consideration! :)

Posted on: Measure Words for Counting People

Hrmm I see.. that's why I was thinking that a work-unit might also be included, as a traditional Chinese work-unit is a bit like a family of families.