User Comments - lostinasia
lostinasia
Posted on: Olympics and more...
July 18, 2008 at 1:57 PMWhoah - only five regular Mandarin lessons per week?! Have I got that right? If so, that would be very annoying.
Hmm... now that I've listened, yes, it does sound like only five Mandarin lessons per week. This worries me, since I spend most of my time in the Upper Intermediate and Advanced. Out of the past 20 lessons, there have been... (pause to count...) 4 in the Upper-Intermediate/ Advanced section. Numbers for all levels: 6 Newbie (I recognize they're good for many, but I don't use them), 5 Ellie (sometimes useful), 4 Intermediate, 3 Upper Intermediate, 2 Advanced, 1 Media. That pattern looks a little TOO deliberate - is this how it's going to be, with 20 lessons per month, rather than 30/31?
And, er, is this actually posted somewhere, rather than just mentioned in a News podcast that I (and likely others) would never have listened to had I not seen the comments?
Posted on: The Olympic Mascots
June 18, 2008 at 2:35 AMThe Five Fuwa of the Apocalpyse!
On those seeing the Fuwa as predicting disaster:
Posted on: Taipei
June 13, 2008 at 1:22 AMHere is a blog post about a plugin for Traditional Characters that can be used in Firefox. It worked when I installed it a while back.
- the plug-in, linked to above: it shows traditional characters for dialogues, expansion sentences, and glossary entries, but not for user comments. If the plug-in is installed, then you're automatically directed to traditional pdfs and html files. (The plug-in doesn't work yet for Firefox 3, however. I don't believe there's ever been such a plug-in for IE or Safari.)
-
- as hezhicheng says above, in your feed, you can choose to receive a traditional character PDF as well.
- as tvan just pointed out, you can add "trad" to the end of the address.
- most useful for me: I normally copy "PDF" link, paste that into the address bar, then change ".pdf" to "trad.html". That gives a traditional html file, which is much more useful for cutting and pasting.
Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen
June 12, 2008 at 12:17 PMrcamposgmail, you asked "Why did shuaibao used the "子" in "天安门是什么样子". The lesson Fortunate Cookies includes 样子 in the Expansion sentences. The examples there may help out a bit. One example:
你新買的手機是什麼樣子的？ / What is your new mobile phone like?)
If you look up 什么样 in the glossary, vs 什么样子, that can help. It seems like 什么样 is similar to "what kind" and 什么样子 is closer to "what's it like".
Except one of those sentences is:
外星人到底长什么样？奇怪吗？
(So what do aliens really look like? Weird?)
And that would seem to contradict what I've just said. Ah well. I can provide some leads, if not an answer.
Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen
June 11, 2008 at 2:31 PM(Grimaces as he starts to type:) Oh man... sorry Clay, I'm going to try really hard to keep this clean and relevant... but... how shall I put this... I can't be the only one that wishes the lesson title focussed on a different famous landmark in Beijing or Shanghai or wherever. There's lots to choose from. That way I'd be able to focus on directions and imperative structure without getting distracted, and the lesson would be more educationally useful.
I DON'T want this to start a massive off-topic discussion (er, assuming this thread has a topic, which I don't believe it does)... but I had to say something.
PS: the "rule" about not ending with a preposition is total nonsense - an urban myth, non-existent. It's not even pushing up the daisies and no more; it quite simply never was. As Churchill may have but probably didn't say, "It is a rule up with which I shall not put." (Now THIS is a safer direction for the OT thread to take.)
Posted on: SBTG: Sun Yatsen
June 11, 2008 at 7:22 AMweibwo, there is already a lesson about the Dream of the Red Chamber. It's in advanced and is somewhat beyond my level, but it may suit you:
Somewhere up there Journey to the West was mentioned. There's also been a lesson about that, in Upper Intermediate:
I believe we're still waiting for lessons about The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (yawn, I'm not too eager for that one), and Strange Tales of LiaoZhai. Unless they're buried in Advanced Lesson titles that I don't understand.
And then there's the guy who won the Nobel Prize - Gao Xingjian. I read Soul Mountain (in English!)... uh, is it any good in Chinese?
Posted on: SBTG: Sun Yatsen
June 10, 2008 at 10:29 AMIn the expansion sentences, the Chinese text for the third sentence with "尚 / shàng / yet" isn't complete. Here's what you've got right now:
政府尚未公布具體的調整,。
The government has not yet announced the specifics of its restructuring scheme.
There should be another couple of words after the comma.
Posted on: Pageant Final Episode
June 8, 2008 at 3:59 PM
Posted on: Pageant Final Episode
June 8, 2008 at 3:04 PMrich, if possible for you, look at the Lesson Sets. I've added one for the Beauty Pageant now. The list seems to automatically be in order of publication. Mind you, I'm not entirely sure who can use the Lesson Sets.
Oh, and if you're searching by lesson number, type in 4 digits in the search bar - 0837, not 837. On my system at least, the search won't recognize three digits as a lesson number.
(PS: "it's" should be "its" in the lesson intro.)
Posted on: Olympics and more...
July 18, 2008 at 2:19 PMCorrection. That should be one advanced out of the past 20 lessons (apparently the new total monthly number), not two.
Seriously, a **28%** (2/7) drop in the amount of content should probably be announced with a bit more warning. I recognize that a while back you also had five lessons per week, but that was when Advanced & Media were off in a separate world.