User Comments - lostinasia

Posted on: Airplane Arrival

Thanks lukeskywalker... as a Canadian I don't really know the Fahrenheit system, but that number didn't seem right in the podcast.

ancalgaon, yes, it is 沒錯 (没错). Technically synonymous with 对? Uh, I'm not sure. Functionally often the same? Yes.

Posted on: Working Hours

Is anyone else not getting this in their feed? Qing Wen dropped from my feed a while ago, and no matter how many times I checked that darn box, it won't come back... have I now lost Newbie as well?

Posted on: Chinese Universities

An article in Slate all about the Chinese university entrance exams:

http://www.slate.com/id/2192732/

Full title: China's SAT - if the SAT lasted two days, covered everything you'd ever studied, and decided your future.

Posted on: Seoul

I just want to follow up on what sfrrr said at the very beginning... I understand that's it's nice to have a series that can work in different levels, but I do wish these city lessons were at least a touch higher - because at the Ellie level we don't learn much more than the name of the city. Between Dear Leaders and Great Leaders, "poxintang" / 보신탕, one of the premiere Asian film festivals in Busan, perhaps the best food in Asia (uh, that's Korean food in general, decidedly NOT 보신탕), mountaintop "yodelling", and the two hottest stars on the overall-really-hot-cast of "Lost", there's much more that could be done with Korea.

The Korean phonetic script is brilliant and it always makes me wonder why people in Taiwan think so highly of zhuyin bopomofo.

Posted on: Pageant Final Episode

One of my dictionaries, curiously, distinguishes between qiang1shou3 (a gunman) and qiang1shou5 (a substitute examinee/ ghost writer). Same characters. Both are indicated as nouns, although it's a pretty terse dictionary.

Part of me isn't too happy with the "lowered" intermediate level, but I've got to admit that's purely for selfish reasons - these are indeed a better transition from ellie, especially I think because the dialogues are now short enough that John & Jenny cover virtually everything, whether it be grammar or vocab. I thought they did a fantastic job on this lesson.

I just wish my apparent move from Intermediate to Upper Intermediate came more from my own progress and less from ChinesePod shifting the ground underneath me!

I still need to gripe about the expansion sentences... someone for whom this lesson is just right is probably NOT ready to produce sentences like "Getting home after work, seeing my child's innocent smiling face, I lost any tiredness I felt."

Posted on: I Don't Have the Strength (... 不动）

The lesson intro does have mighty curious English...

For some reason I can't get Qing Wen in my feed through iTunes or in the "Me" tab anymore. I've ticked the box to select it in my feed, again and again (and it always shows as selected), but still no podcast. I can always download it off the site, of course, but still... something isn't right...

(This is with Safari.)

Posted on: Billiards

Sushan, following up the thread you've started elsewhere: I can't leave a comment on that User-Generated thread with either Firefox for Mac or Safari for Mac. Since there's no longer an IE for Mac, I'm even feeling a little bit censored!

(I suggest we consider "gibberish" to mean "material off-topic for the Chinese lesson". Alas, many of us seem unable to post anywhere except in the Lesson sections!)

Edit (yay! I can edit! Great addition): earlier I was able to comment in John's monster thread about the new features. Now I cannot.

Things are definitely still in flux... the RSS feeds seem to have worked in at least three different ways over the past couple of days.

Posted on: SBTG: Confucius

Getting the traditional html for this lesson is still quite convoluted... follow the PDF link, and then write over "894" with "891" twice in the web address. I guess this isn't a big deal for me now, since I've found it, but ChinesePod should probably repair the link.

Posted on: Taipei

The naked sushi comes from Japan. I've heard rumours of such things in Taiwan, but only at a pretty underground level. Betel nut is sold at stands everywhere, most often staffed by... well, anyone. The micro-mini skirts & just-a-bra-thank-you venders aren't something you see in the cities; they're often out by the highway interchanges. They don't seem as common as they used to, or maybe they're just less common in the north (where I live now) than in the south (where I used to live). You do sometime see bikini-clad women dancing, or just standing around, in funeral procession trucks, or (very) occasionally even in temple festivals--as a friend once put it, "I guess the gods like [nekkid chickbabes] too". I missed my window to try betel nut; I was curious when I first arrived here, but now I find the smell absolutely nauseating.

Posted on: Taipei

As glad as I am to see a lesson about my current home... ChinesePod is really working on bridging that Ellie-Int gap, isn't it? Ah well, I guess it's what people want and need, but many more Intermediate lessons at this level and I may start talking about an Int/ Up-Int gap. The expansion section has Yangmingshan in the vocabulary--this is a mountain park to the north of Taipei. Lovely place; for a big city, Taipei has an amazing number of nearby places to hike.