User Comments - light487
light487
Posted on: What's Your Name?
April 9, 2008 at 11:08 AMnı3 jiao2 shen2-me mıng2-zi? What’s your name? This part confused me a little.. I took the whole line for granted to mean exactly what was explained in the lesson. However I feel that the translation needs some clarification. As I understand it now a little more than I did before. What is actually being asked here is: "You are to be called by what name?", not just simply "What is your name?".. yes the overall meaning is the same but the direct translation loses a little analytic information that is beneficial to learning and understanding the phrase by translating it thus. For the purposes of the spoken lesson, the brief translation is necessary because the focus is to aid the newbie in developing their spoken mandarin rather than getting bogged down in the meanings, so I am not suggesting that the audio part of the lesson is misleading.. just that the PDF should have may be expanded a little more on this idea.
Posted on: Train to Beijing
April 9, 2008 at 8:28 AMHey.. So I just realised that the reason Jenny is scared to ride on trains wasn't translated.. would anyone be kind enough to let me know what she is scared of? I assume that she is scared of being crushed? She is after-all "light, quick, and de-emphasised".. so crushing on trains would be a serious problem.. :)
Posted on: Train to Beijing
April 9, 2008 at 8:20 AMI certainly can't keep up with this lesson at my level but I found the translation and banter during the translation to be more beneficial than the actual lesson itself because I can hear Jenny explaining the lesson to John. A real conversation... I'm not learning anything other than the individual words.. but I am picking up more on the music of the language which is beneficial too. hahaha.. "bunk bed" part of lesson.. I don't think I'll ever get used to some of the sounds in mandarin as they sound too similar to some other words in English.. hahaha.. :)
Posted on: Ending Your Sentence with 吧 (ba)
April 9, 2008 at 1:35 AMit's like when you say.. "This is correct, right?" or "This is incorrect, right?" the "ba" is the same as the word "right?" in those sentences. At least that is now my understanding of it.
Posted on: Ending Your Sentence with 吧 (ba)
April 8, 2008 at 10:01 AMni hao ma? - Are you alright? (I really want to know) ni hao ba? - Are you alright? (being polite) Yes.. looking at it like this makes a big difference. Hopefully as we explore the other particles, they will help define each other through exclusivity of use.
Posted on: Bank Hours
April 8, 2008 at 9:53 AMAlso I notice that as I transition into more than basic spoken mandarin, I have to learn completely new words all the time. How did I ever learn so many English words.. even words that I do not know, I can generally piece together because I know how all the building blocks work. I guess this is what it will be like when moving up to a completely new level, like Intermediate. I had a listen to a "Media" grade lesson a little while a go and I had no idea what was being said at all. Baillies said: "I think the hardest thing is that Jenny is using words that are not in the current CPod (Newbie/ele) lesson vocab i.e. noun, verb, sentence, ..." This is really it in a nutshell. If you try and remember back to when you first started to learn mandarin, there is a point when have learnt enough basic words and concepts to start to link phrases together yourself. This is an ongoing process and so as you move up in difficulty you have to repeat this same painful step again and again, I believe. Now that you have a good foundation in the language, you have the tools needed to construct basic "newbie" and "elementary" level sentences and phrases but lack the knowledge to do the same with Intermediate level concepts and words. Know what I mean?
Posted on: Bank Hours
April 8, 2008 at 9:41 AMI love this lesson. I work in the finance industry so it is very relevant to me and also as I am fairly new to mandarin, it is a good step up from newbie level. This phenomenon of bank-sitting is not uncommon here in Australia as well, especially on pension day. We were discussing it today when one of the branch people came in for a visit to see what we do in the call-centre. For someone who is at the elementary level already, I could understand how this lesson might be considered a bit easy as some of the newbie lessons are approximately at this level but rather than dealing with basic concepts and sentence construction, this lesson seems to make the sentences a little more complex and involved more overall meaning. It also contains a bit of objection and dealing with objection instructions in there. It's borderline but definitely in the realms of elementary.
Posted on: Ending Your Sentence with 吧 (ba)
April 8, 2008 at 9:11 AMSo it's almost rhetoric but not quite because you are 99% sure you know what the answer is but you just want to be polite and make sure. ------------------------------------------- My mum had a saying when I was a kid.. it was intentionally meant to be rude to get a reaction from myself and my brothers and sister. She would say "yum yum pig's bum".. because as we all know, pork rump is "hen hao chu" when cooked just right.. but the point of saying it is to shock us.. she's our mum.. she would never swear right? :) She was always surprising like that. :) We were VERY young at the time of course.. However, Australians use the term "bum" a lot when I think about it now... it's not really considered to be a bad or rude word but I can see how it could be considered to be that.
Posted on: Choosing a Chinese Name and Safety
April 8, 2008 at 8:50 AMI had another idea.. my name is hebrew meaning "Light", hence why my username is light487. Perhaps I could find something in Chinese that would work as a meaning of Light. Light as in the opposite of dark not the opposite of heavy. May be something that means "to shed light" or "to make bright" or "to bring light".. or may be more metaphorical where the darkness is a lack of knowledge or ignorance.. or perhaps the darkness is evil/badness.. Something cool! :) haha.. I was born in year of Dragon.. so may be something cool that incorporates this too.. I don't know.. lù kè will do for now until I can come up with something better. :)
Posted on: What's Your Name?
April 9, 2008 at 11:12 AMOh yes, I forgot to mention that the reason I thought this was worth pointing out was that I was trying to clarify the point of the "ming-zi" phrase/concept and I looked for it being referenced somewhere in my lessons. For some reason, everywhere I looked I could only find references to "jiao" till I ended up back at this lesson which is the only lesson I have heard it used.