User Comments - lostinasia
lostinasia
Posted on: War Zone
August 1, 2008 at 12:33 PMDecent lesson - no complaints about it - although I found it MUCH more disturbing than the screaming woman and power tools lesson. World War I and going "over the top" is the first thing I thought of when listening. I'm about to destroy everyone's mood: I kept thinking these were the last words of a boy right before he died!
See here for perhaps the finest five minutes of television Rowan Atkinson has ever been involved with - the closing scene of the Blackadder WWI series. And, if you're a fan of the TV show House and you haven't seen Hugh Laurie's earlier roles... you're in for a shock. Absolutely no Chinese content, I'm afraid.
Posted on: Microsoft
July 31, 2008 at 12:33 PMRe: lessons about "the village": There's an upper intermediate (with a MASSIVE dialogue portion) about urban folk working for a while in the countryside:
Posted on: Tool Delivery
July 31, 2008 at 5:33 AMOther tools, taken from an Illustrated Chinese-English Dictionary:
- 扳手 / bānshou / wrench
- 鏟子 / chǎnzi / shovel
- 電鑽 / diànzuàn / electric drill
- 斧頭 / fǔtou / ax, axe
- 工具箱 / gōngjùxiāng / toolbox
- 掛鉤 / guàgōu / hook
- 海綿 / hǎimián / sponge
- 膠帶 / jiāodài / tape
- 榔頭 / lángtou / hammer
- 螺絲 / luósī / screw
- 螺絲刀 / luósīdāo / screwdriver
- 皮尺 / píchǐ / tape measure
- 鉗子 / qiánzi / pliers
- 日光燈 / rìguāngdēng / fluorescent light
- 手電筒 / shǒudiàntǒng / flashlight, torch
- 刷子 / shuāzi / scrubbing brush
- 水桶 / shuǐtǒng / bucket
- 鐵釘 / tiědīng / nail
- 梯子 / tīzi / ladder
- 油漆 / yóuqī / paint
- 油漆滾筒 / yóuqī gǔntǒng / paint roller
- 油漆刷 / yóuqīshuā / paintbrush
Posted on: 好莱坞大片
July 30, 2008 at 1:44 PMAs discussed here, ChinesePod will apparently be going back and tidying up old lessons. I really hope that part of that tidying will involve proper English translations of the PROPER nouns. I don't care about the odd normal vocabulary translations, but please, give us pop-up translations of proper names like 諜影重重3 - which MDBG translates for me as "Spy Shadows Layers 3", or something like that. (Thanks for above posters for making this easier.)
Where the heck do Chinese movie names come from?! I KNOW the name for Ratatouille - I bought the DVD in Taiwan - and it's called 料理鼠王. The DVD's right here in front of me. But in Mainland China I guess it's 美食總動員, which apparently translates roughly as "General Mobilization for War in the Food Court"?!!?!
Posted on: Getting a Phone Number
July 30, 2008 at 12:31 PMElaborate Chinese number characters: you will sometimes see MUCH more complicated number characters to forestall bank fraud (think about how easy it'd be to change 一〇〇〇 to 九〇〇〇). I got this list of equivalents from chindict.php by searching with "banker's anti-fraud numeral":
- 一 / 壹
- 二 / 貳
- 三 / 叄
- 四 / 肆
- 五 / 伍
- 六 / 陸
- 七 / 柒
- 八 / 捌
- 九 / 玖
- 十 / 拾
- 廿 / 念
Posted on: Microsoft
July 29, 2008 at 11:42 AMThanks rjberki! That was dumb of me... I looked up microscope in ChinesePod's dictionary and only paid attention to the first character!
Posted on: Microsoft
July 29, 2008 at 5:48 AMMore micro/ 微 connections:
Microwave = 微波炉 = wēibōlú (in Mobile Repairman and Cooking Wings)
Extremely/ micro fine needle = 微波针 = wēibōzhēn (in Chinese Medicine: Acupuncture, Cupping and Scraping)
(The word doesn't, as far as I can tell, appear in microscope.)
Posted on: Microsoft
July 28, 2008 at 3:13 PMtimbendersls, I can tell you that for Taiwan people will often NOT know the English versions of names.
This leads to somewhat surprising difficulties - for example, talking about movies is really hard, because nobody knows the names Keanu Reeves or Bruce Willis or Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts (never mind less famous and more interesting figures). Occasionally you'll luck across a name that sounds really similar, but not often. Additionally, no one knows the English movie names, and the Chinese translations seldom have anything to do with the English names.
Talking about politics is tough because, while Obama sounds relatively similar in Chinese, Clinton or McCain doesn't.
Even talking about Harry Potter is tough because Dumbledore translates into "Dum-ba-lee-door", and so on.
I often wind up feeling like a dolt when movies come up in class because all I can talk about are movies like Batman, Superman, Spiderman, or Titanic, but if I talk about any other movies it'll take five minutes of explaining before anyone figures out the movie I mean.
Even FOOD, of all things, can be hard because the English names are so utterly different from the Chinese ones. Also note that for most of Asia, hamburger = McDonald's and salad = lots of mayonnaise + apple pieces.
And, a cultural note: don't expect people to know anything except THE MOST FAMOUS of things from North America and Europe, regardless of whether the name is eventually communicated. Obama, yes. McCain, maybe. Romney, no. Julia Roberts, yes. Rachel Weisz or Juliette Binoche, no. U2, maybe. Nirvana, probably not; Arcade Fire, no way. Bill Gates, yes; Steve Jobs, less likely.
I should also point out that I can name the top two figures in China, but not those immediately below them; I couldn't name any big pop stars; perhaps a few movie stars. I've read about a few of the big business figures but darned if I can remember their names. We all live in our own cultural bubbles.
Posted on: Rock, Scissors, Cloth
August 8, 2008 at 1:02 AMsfrrr asked how people play scissors paper stone in a large group... and I can't give an answer, but I can vouch for the fact that it is done. My students in Taiwan are masters of this game - sometimes I'll ask for a volunteer from a group, and about a dozen of them will launch on mad round after round of 石头剪刀布, and at the end of it there will be a "volunteer." I've seen this many many times but still have no idea how it's done.
Another bar game, one possibly even noisier, is described in this lesson: The Dice Game