User Comments - lostinasia
lostinasia
Posted on: 健康饮食
June 14, 2007 at 3:09 PMUh, no chemicals? Like no H2O or no C6H8O6 (Vitamin C)? Nasty stuff, those chemicals. Here in Taiwan some products are labelled "Non-GMO". Looking at my bottle of soy milk / 豆奶 (hm, I never noticed it's not called 豆漿 before), there's a little green spot with "Non-GMO SOYBEAN" prominently written, and then smaller Chinese underneath: 使用非基因改造黃豆, which vaguely seems to mean "uses non-genetic modified yellow bean." But even though most of the packaging is in Chinese, the non-GM hook is in much bigger English than it is in Chinese. And there's a typical cartoon child picture, which would imply that drinking non-GM doujiang will make your hair fall out and your head swell to a gargantuan size. So I guess 基因改造, jī yīn gǎi zào, is genetically modified. I don't know how "conversational" that is. It's been kind of fun and time-consuming figuring this out...
Posted on: Olympic Swimming
June 14, 2007 at 2:11 PMI confess to being totally confused by the "蛙泳最累" line. Is this from not having any swimmers in the office? 蛙泳 is the easy one, the one you do when you're exhausted or out of shape or both. 蝶泳, however, IS exhausting. We do say "frog kick" in English; as for breast stroke, this is another case where the Chinese name makes a lot more sense than the English one.
Posted on: Exchanging Money
June 14, 2007 at 2:03 PMTentative answer for beaver, from someone who's not an expert: 几 is typically used for smaller numbers. They'll ask you 几位? in a restaurant, not 多少位? I'm sure it's much more nuanced, but that distinction works for me.
Posted on: Lili and Zhang Liang 16: It's Over
June 12, 2007 at 2:27 PMOh man, "The Sopranos" ends, now Zhang Liang/ Lili ends too... not a good week for the serial dramas. How about the undercover cop from Black Market Gun Deal comes back? Or make the useful but kind of dull Canadian businessman enter into a dark underworld of kickbacks and counterfeit pirated hammers, risking the health of DIYers everywhere.
Posted on: The Monkey King
June 11, 2007 at 1:10 PMIt all looks great now, thanks--is the expansion vocab somehow linked to the vocab list that you changed? This morning, the expansion vocab still had some of the "old words" lined up with "new vocab" sentences. But it all looks fine now. Thanks!
Posted on: The Monkey King
June 11, 2007 at 2:31 AMSERIOUSLY out of whack, actually. It looks like you've updated the vocabulary sentences, but the actual list of vocabulary is from the old podcast - and some of those words, like 後悔莫及 and 台詞, no longer appear in the dialogue. I just bought a child's Chinese version of 《西游記》 on the weekend, with zhuyin written at the side... I'm pleasantly surprised that I kind of know what's going on. Having read an English translation certainly helps.
Posted on: The Monkey King
June 11, 2007 at 2:08 AMBoy, that was confusing... I started listening to the new re-worked podcast with the old transcript. Now I get it. But the Expansion Vocab sentences are out of whack in a few places: shifted to the wrong vocabulary item, for example.
Posted on: The Scene of the Accident
June 11, 2007 at 1:33 AMEven weirder - when I copy and paste into here, it DOES convert to pinyin. Too bad it doesn't do that with anything on my system! (The pinyin in the previous post isn't what I see as I type; it only appears after I click on "Add Comment.") Here's the same thing again, with spaces inserted to stop the system from "making it correct": L i & # 4 6 2 ; n g z h & # 2 9 9 ; l & # 4 6 2 ; o h & # 4 6 8 ; , l i & # 4 6 2 ; n g z h & # 2 9 9 ; l & # 4 6 2 ; o h & # 4 6 8 ; ,
Posted on: The Scene of the Accident
June 11, 2007 at 12:45 AMHi markt, thanks. I'm using Mac/ iTunes/ iPod. Maybe it's a bug specific to this kind of set-up... you're talking about the "Information" field, right, not the Lyrics field or the PDF? The part that comes with the downloaded podcast. That's where I'm having the trouble. Interesting... I've just tried playing the MP3 with RealPlayer and I can't seem to get that information displayed at all, but then again, I've never used RealPlayer for an MP3 before. Windows Media Player hasn't been revised for Mac in a few years now I think--the version on my system is #9, and it won't even recognize the file to play. When I open that field in iTunes, and copy and paste, it still pastes out as what I believe is technically known as gobbledygook. An example of what I see, from the Two Tigers one a few days ago: 两只老虎，两只老虎， Liǎng zhī lǎohǔ, liǎng zhī lǎohǔ, Two tigers, two tigers,
Posted on: Ice Cream
June 15, 2007 at 6:57 AMChangye, you can often find 香菜 (the John Pasden special!) right beside the 咖哩, 酸辣, and 麻辣 ice cream. Boy I hope I'm joking with that. Durian (榴蓮) ice cream isn't uncommon. On that part, I'm not joking (unfortunately).