User Comments - lostinasia

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lostinasia

Posted on: Microsoft
July 28, 2008 at 6:45 AM

Yes, Bill Gates' retirement is pretty big news. See a briefer and a longer article in The Economist from a couple of weeks ago.

Posted on: Chinese Commuters
July 28, 2008 at 5:59 AM

Question about the vocabulary:

You've got 拥有权 = tōngyǒuquán = ownership. Shouldn't that be yōngyǒuquán? That's certainly what the audio sounds like.

Posted on: Experiencing Agricultural Life
July 27, 2008 at 2:06 AM

Unless I'm really missing something, you can't copy and paste from PDFs here. The characters and English work out OK, but the pinyin pastes as a total mess. (Hence the html files rather than PDFs.)

Posted on: The Olympic Mascots
July 26, 2008 at 2:17 AM

Years after China got bored of them, the rest of the world is paying attention: an article in Slate, "Stop Picking On Beijing's Olympic Mascots", about how Fuwa are hated, and how actually they're a lot better than many other Olympic mascots. The article's right - some of those other mascots are truly awful.

(I'm guessing Slate's behind the Firewall, but non-Chinese based readers should be OK.)

Posted on: Connecting with Email
July 25, 2008 at 2:49 AM

It's an old lesson - at this stage levels weren't really set up yet. The banter reflects the haphazard organization of the time. Also, at this time Ken used more Chinese in the lessons, which stopped because of the now-quiescent "tone police".

Posted on: How do you take your coffee?
July 25, 2008 at 2:03 AM

Here's a link to the menu for Barista, a Starbucks-like coffee chain in Taiwan:

http://www.barista.com.tw/main3.htm

You'll see traditional characters and English; no pinyin, but of course you can cut and paste into different pinyin converters or simplified traditional converters if you're interested.

 

Posted on: 十月怀胎
July 25, 2008 at 1:09 AM

aaroninwisconsin, and others: below are some other baby and pregnancy related lessons (since the "Related Lessons" window provided by ChinesePod doesn't work very well).

With nearly a thousand lessons in the archive, often by now ChinesePod DOES have lessons related to a topic, at a range of levels. Unfortunately, they can be difficult to find.

Anyway, lessons for this - they're all in Elementary or Intermediate:

Adoption

Baby Care

Condoms (OK, only tenuously related!)

Pregnancy

Where Children Come From

And a big lesson set that I've shared, for health and body topics:

Health

(My usual compliant/ reminder to ChinesePod: I found these quite easily, by searching the lesson transcripts that are on my own computer. Finding them through search functions on the site would have been incredibly time-consuming, as well as very hit-and-miss. Make your archive easier to work through!)

Posted on: A Visit by the Police
July 21, 2008 at 1:05 PM

damon, it does work on my Mac. Here's what I do when I'm using Safari:

  1. Right-click on "Lesson Transcript PDF", and choose "Copy Link" (You can also Ctrl-click if you don't have a mouse with a right button.)
  2. Open a new tab (with Command-T).
  3. In the new tab, move the cursor to the address bar at the top.
  4. Paste the address with Command-V. Don't hit return yet!
  5. Go to the end of the address: you'll see ###.pdf. Change it to ###trad.pdf. Now hit return--it should take you to the traditional PDF.
  6. Alternate choice: change ###.pdf to ###trad.html to see the traditional html file.
With Safari now, PDFs are displayed within the browser--they're not automatically downloaded (or at least not on my system; I forget if I changed a default somewhere). You can Command-S to save.
Assuming you're a subscriber, you can get the traditional PDF in your feed.
Note that many of the older podcasts don't have a traditional html file and will return an error of some kind.

Posted on: 十月怀胎
July 21, 2008 at 12:51 PM

I think the level of English in the podcast, PDF, and expansion sections is just right. Bloody hard (for now), but appropriate. I actually kind of like the, er, half-assed automatic mouseover translations - a clumsy crutch makes you that much more eager to start walking properly. (As long as they get the proper nouns right!)

I DO wish there were more English "ways into the lesson" - through tagging, related lessons, topic lists, and for that matter through English titles.

Someone else suggested this... how about ALL titles of lessons, at ALL levels, being in both English and Chinese?

Posted on: Olympics and more...
July 18, 2008 at 3:13 PM

Thanks henning - I just posted over there too.

Sigh. About 48 hours ago I was somewhat satisfied (but not happy) re: the traditional plug-in. I did hope to have at least a few weeks without getting annoyed again. I just wish ChinesePod would stop making me feel like a sucker...