User Comments - lostinasia

Posted on: 中国鬼节

I know it's been this weekend. And there's too much smoke everywhere.

Posted on: Chinglish in Reverse and University Culture

I teach at a university in Taipei, and it's totally routine for students to sleep in class. In general foreign teachers don't let the students do that - I've kicked students out a few times - but it seems like here, attendance is crucial, but what you do in class is up to you. I'll walk past other classes where a professor is lecturing on and on, and virtually the entire class either has heads down on desks, or is reading a newspaper, or playing with their cell phones... anything but paying attention.

Eating, however, is considered disrespectful towards the teacher, and generally doesn't happen. To me it's utterly counter-intuitive: eating is forbidden because it's rude, but sleeping is OK?! Students get confused when they enter my class and what they're used to is suddenly reversed.

I felt guilty in one class a few years back, where a couple of students were quietly eating their breakfast (they knew to remove the crinkly plastic bags, which is all I care about), and another teacher suddenly came in to "help" the poor foreigner and started tearing into the students for being rude and losing Taiwan's face, or something like that.

It's weird how the incentives work; I was at one college where you could be failed out of the school for missing too many classes, but not for your actual scores. So I had a couple of really annoying students that attended every class, but did absolutely nothing and were generally a pain in the neck and a distraction to everyone else. I doubt they even got 20% in my class, but because they were always there, they weren't in danger of being kicked out of the school.

Admission: I skipped many a class when I was a university student, but I don't believe I ever slept in class. I'm pretty sure I've always considered it very rude, except perhaps in the furthest reaches of the largest lecture halls. I know when I'm teaching a class, and someone's sleeping, it's very distracting and I have to do something about it.

Posted on: The Panda's Secret Wish

Calkins, I haven't found a way to add lessons to someone else's shared Lesson Set; I suppose what would work best would be to send a message to the set creator, and then they can do it. (I still suspect user-tagging would be a good feature, although it might lead to massive keyword bloat).

Your shared sets are updated when you change them within your own archive, so we don't need to "re-share" changed sets. (You'd probably already realized that.)

If you import (or whatever the term is) someone else's shared lesson set, then that set becomes one of your own, and you can add other lessons to it - but that doesn't affect the original shared set.

Posted on: 功夫之王

Thanks John - so I was sort of on the right track with 力捧. I've been unable to find that collocation anywhere. As for tian/ pian... sigh. I'm used to getting the tones wrong, or ch/q or sh/ s (especially in Taiwan!)... but if I'm getting p/t wrong now, I'm in real trouble.

Posted on: 功夫之王

Pronunciation query: when I listen to the audio button for "天不怕地不怕", I hear "p" at the beginning, not "t". I've listened to it again and again. Am I crazy?

Plus: "受到公司的力捧" - "received great offers from companies"? I'm confused about 力捧 here. Dictionaries are giving me things like "powerful hold", which sounds more like a Hulk Hogan wrestling move than anything a 公司 would be doing.

Posted on: The Panda's Secret Wish

Other joke/ humour lessons:

Dumb Joke

The Man and the Dog

Sheep, Wolves, and Fruit: a Riddle (joke? Linguistic games and puns anyway)

Pretty Ugly (an example of a joke that wouldn't fly in the west)

The Monks in the Temple on the Mountain (this is the circular one you may be remembering, where it keeps looping back on itself.)

April Fool's

Eating Tofu (Do you like eating tofu? You do? Ha ha ha ha ha!)

(Once again, ChinesePod, please make the potentially-fantastic "related lessons" box more useful. Does 十月怀胎 come up because the pregnant woman compares herself to a bear walking down the street?!)

Posted on: Rock, Scissors, Cloth

Re: sfrrr and others, on scissors paper stone in groups: yesterday I finally remembered to ask one of my classes! Everyone in the group does the gesture thing together. The key: the resulting hands need to show only two signs to be valid; if there are three signs, then the round doesn't count and they do it again.

• First example game: they were looking for a loser. They got four paper and one stone. The one stone lost. Game done.
• Second example game: also looking for a loser. 1st round: two stone + two paper + one scissors. Unresolved. 2nd round: 1 stone + 1 paper + 3 scissors. Unresolved. 3rd round: 2 scissors + 3 stone. Since we're looking for a loser, the 3 stones "win" and are out; the 2 scissors now compete to see who will be the final loser. 4th round: 1 stone + 1 paper. Stone loses and buys the next round.

     (Bug alert for ChinesePod: if I type bullets in a comment, and then revert to normal paragraphs, the subsequent normal paragraphs "don't work"--there's no line separation. If I try to add lines in editing, then the lines for some reason get added before the bulleted points, not where I've actually added them!)

Posted on: Taking a Shower

A alternate list of "Related Lessons"... first topically...

Someone needs a shower

Morning Hygiene

Number Two

...and on the hear/ not hear issue:

KTV

Hard of Hearing

(WHAT is going on with the "Related Lessons" box?! It should be useful for something other than humor value... I got the results above with my computer and Mac's Spotlight in about five minutes. Seriously, directing someone at a Newbie level to a Media lesson?!) 

Posted on: Taking a Shower

There are a couple of Q.W. related to the, er, complements or whatever they're called:

I Can/Can't Afford it (...得起 & ...不起）

To Finish Something Off: Verb 好 (hǎo)

Using Verbs 不出来 (bu chūlai), 得出来 (de chūlai)

The grammar guide has a link for complements, although it doesn't seem to lead anywhere...

And Mandarin Chinese verb complement, on a different site, has some helpful stuff.

Summary as I see it: they're very useful, very common, pretty easy to understand, and awfully hard to integrate into my own speaking.

Posted on: Ping Pong Nation

A recent story on NPR, China's Pingpong Stars Find New Home Teams, talks about some of these issues - Chinese stars past their prime move on to other countries where they're suddenly national champions. There's some griping about it, but to be honest, after all the years of American baseball players moving on to Japan and Taiwan, or Canadian hockey players moving on to Europe, there's not much to complain about.