User Comments - lostinasia
lostinasia
Posted on: Touring a Factory
July 5, 2007 at 12:26 AMnewyorkscott, not a foolish question at all. You need to *right*-click on the "Full episode download", and a menu will appear. Choose "Download linked file" from the menu that appears, and that should do it. (If you don't have a two-button mouse, you can Ctrl + Click instead, and that'll also give you the menu.) It's easy enough once you know how, but it certainly isn't intuitive. I'm often surprised by what little key strokes using the Ctrl, Alt, or Command key can do!
Posted on: 教书育人
June 30, 2007 at 10:13 AMAZERDocMom, there's at least one Safari plug-in that can do the same thing: Live dictionary, at: http://www.eloquentsw.com/livedictionary.html I'm pretty sure I learned about it from someone on ChinesePod, but I no longer have any idea who. It can give you the Chinese for English words as well. However, you do have to pay for it after a 10 day (?) free trial - I think it's $25. I actually haven't bothered to buy it, because most of my studying is done offline (perhaps because these forums are a big distraction), but it's definitely worth a look. (Like you, I prefer Safari to Firefox. Firefox seems a lot slower on my system.)
Posted on: Experiencing Agricultural Life
June 29, 2007 at 1:58 AMMy PDF isn't working either. Using Mac & Safari.
Posted on: Resisting Relocation
June 27, 2007 at 12:59 PMThanks Henning... I had pretty much the same theory and was wondering how to say that in Chinese. Amusingly, Google Translate gives me back that character string as "Bloggers find brick levy shoot Huachou menstrual Tie", which is pretty darn close to a Haiku. (With apologies to Changye, who can surely give us a real Haiku.) Pinyin for #2 & #3, which are also the ones that make some idiomatic sense in English: 找拍 - zhǎo pāi (seems to be like "looking for a beating", or "looking for trouble") 找抽 - zhǎo chōu (like "looking for smoke"?) MDBG dictionary gives me various pronunciation possibilities for the first and fourth, which are also the idiomatically odd ones - collecting bricks for a building? an invitation to menstruation?!
Posted on: She's Easy
June 26, 2007 at 1:55 PMAre you a merry can or a merry can't? (I have no idea what that could mean, just flashing back to Johnny Depp in one of those Antonio Banderas guitarist gunslinger movies.) Chinese question!, #1: Near the end of the podcast, at 13:50, Jenny says something like "bao li jue jue", and John replies (translates?) with "maybe think about reforming your behaviour". What is this sentence? Is this the phrase my students keep translating as "Do a self-examination"? (Which may or may not be the same action people kept needing to do during the Cultural Revolution.) My students will often talk about doing a self-examination when they're worried they've done something wrong, and they want to change... I guess there's a clear verb in Chinese for this, while English doesn't really have a common one. Question #2: I'm confused about 小白脸: in the definition and two of the example sentences, the meaning is gold-digger. But in both the conversation and this example sentence... 我不喜欢小白脸，我喜欢粗犷型的。 I don't like pretty boys--I like the rugged type. ... the meaning seems different. Can the phrase alternatively be "pretty boy"? Comment/ constructive criticism: I often find the example sentences rather, um, oddly graded. A little in intermediate; a lot in upper intermediate. (While Ellie ones seem too easy.) For example, this lesson included biotechnology, autopsy, and 往往 for "often", which seems easy enough but I don't think I've seen it before. Intermediate podcasts usually meet my "comfort level + 10%"; the example sentences, on the other hand, don't so much reinforce the vocab as introduce all kinds of new expressions. Oh, and I enjoyed the lesson, I was just surprised by the title. Having two women complain about one woman's behaviour doesn't seem at all sexist to me. After all, these are just characters, not proclamations about What Women Want or whatever. However, I do think an upcoming lesson should talk about a lecherous husband with a "second wife" who's squandered the kids' tuition gambling in Macau.
Posted on: She's Easy
June 25, 2007 at 4:29 PMThanks Jenny--now maybe someone can let me know about how insulting the English version is! I've always thought "She's easy" was also very strong and insulting, but the fact it was used as the title makes me think my own usage may not be the most common one. I'm not objecting to the title at all, but it was a surprise to see it; for me, it's probably stronger/ more rude than "He's such an a*s*h*le." (Slang can be so particular to wherever and whenever you were in your teens/ early 20s, which was at the height of political correctness on the Left Coast in my case.) As an ESL teacher, I really enjoy correcting common mistake patterns like, "My friend is good at English - she's very easy", along with "We gave him the clap", "I went out with my lover", "I played with myself", and - not a common pattern, but a priceless seen-once-only mistake - "My dog pleasures me every day when I come home from work." Those kinds of sentences are great for waking the class [and me] up a little, but now I wonder if I've been overemphasizing how bad "She's easy" is to say! I'm quite sure, however, I'm never going to recommend it as a good line to use. And Jenny, do you ever sleep?! Midnight Shanghai time and you're posting?!
Posted on: She's Easy
June 25, 2007 at 2:39 PMUh... usage/ register question about "easy" / 随便, for both English and Chinese, for that matter. I've always thought that saying "She's easy" is pretty similar to saying "She's a...", well, rhymes with shut. In other words, QUITE a bad thing to say. (I suppose "She gets around" would be a very slightly more delicate thing to say.) Am I way off on how that phrase is used in English these days? And in Chinese, how strong is the phrase?
Posted on: Studying Japanese
June 25, 2007 at 2:11 PMWouldn't you know it, this lesson appears just after I come back from a week in Japan. It was really weird to be able to read the kanji and understanding a lot of the meaning, but then have no idea how to pronounce it. 非常門 for "emergency exit" amused me. Extreme door? Like extreme skiing? Or the essence of doorness? My wife's Taiwanese-published Chinese language guidebook often had Chinese characters only, with no pronunciation. So I'd be leafing through the Lonely Planet, looking for the same characters, to figure out what place was being spoken about. And may I point out that Taiwanese guidebooks are infinitely better than western ones at suggesting restaurants? Mind you, they waste far too much time on where to buy the shrink-wrapped famous food from so and so town as gifts for home. In Taiwan the Japanese word for 的, の, often shows up on signs. I'll occasionally point this out to the Taiwanese who complain about simplified characters on the Mainland. Does Japanese script ever show up in Mainland China? Learning Japanese vs Chinese... in the 1980s, those who were interested in languages in the west were learning Japanese and Russian, because they were the two other titans besides America. Times have changed. As for anti-Japan feeling in Mainland China... there was a lot of news about this a year or two ago, perhaps Yasukuni Shrine related, I forget (April 2005, Wikipedia tells me). And it wasn't the older generation, not unless they're expert bloggers and hackers.
Posted on: Olympic Swimming
June 15, 2007 at 7:08 AMlesotho: on my iPod (iPod Photo, using iTunes and a Mac), the 看 appears properly in this podcast in the podcast information section; my iPod doesn't have a lyrics function. The QUALITY of the character/ font isn't that good, mind you--it's a little blurred out and, like so often with characters like 畫, it's really hard to discern exactly how many lines there are.
Posted on: Global Warming
July 6, 2007 at 12:17 PMA plea for the expansion sentences: make them easier! Often when I look through these at the Upper Intermediate level I feel like a total dolt and wonder how I could possibly forget so much vocab. Tonight I've actually compared the vocab with my flash cards - and YES, the vocabulary in these sentences is really new, not just stuff I've forgot. The flash card decks I've got on my own system pretty much include the vocab from all Newbie, Elementary, and Intermediate, and about half of all Upper Intermediate lessons. Yet in the first NINE, nine only, sentences from this lesson's Expansion, there were 15 terms that weren't in my flash card deck - which means I hadn't encountered them in a ChinesePod lesson dialogue or as expansion vocab (some of these were included in earlier expansion sentences, however). (There were two that I did have but had forgot.) In one way figuring this out makes me feel better - in the nine really confusing sentences, I'd actually only forgot two terms. The rest was genuinely new. However, example sentences like this are not really helpful... how can it reinforce the new vocab if most of the sentences are graded so high? This is becoming more of an issue now with The Fix, which is a great feature hobbled by the expansion material used. An analogy: I'm teaching the word "cat". What sentences are more useful for the student?: a) I have two cats. b) Cats are very cute. c) Do you have a cat or a dog? d) Cats are nocturnal creatures of the mammalian order specializing in rodent extermination. Right now, it seems like we're getting too many sentences of the (d) variety. (Yes, of course ones like a, b, and c are too basic for Upper-Intermediate, but I'm just trying to make a point.) I recognize that at the Upper Intermediate level we should know a lot of vocab, and there should be some new phrases and terms, but the amount of new vocab in the expansion section really does seem out of control at times. I really hope ChinesePod can continue to improve and work on this issue. (Oh, the words that were not in my own flash card records: 一套套, 不斷, 任何, 來勢, 兇猛, 勝過, 厭煩, 囉唆, 巨大, 恐怖分子, 破壞, 進行, 降臨, 難道, 預測.)