User Comments - lostinasia
lostinasia
Posted on: Hold the MSG
March 5, 2008 at 11:17 AMToday has a lengthy New York Times article about MSG and how much it's used in cooking--and in all sorts of foods: Pringles, low-fat yogurt and ice cream, nacho-flavoured Doritos, anything ranch- or cheese-flavoured... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/dining/05glute.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all
Posted on: My Scooter Won't Start
March 4, 2008 at 6:47 AMRich--yeah, what you saw in Taipei are scooters. Most Taiwanese don't know this word; when I mention "scooter" to my students here, they don't know what I'm talking about. Basically scooters use only an accelerator on the handlebars, and front and rear brakes, also on the handle bars. There's nothing for the feet to do except keep you up, and no gears to change. Question: how could I say... "The battery's dead and I can't kick-start it. Can you charge the battery for me?" I'm assuming jump-start is NOT 跳發動, nor kick-start 踢發動. (Not that this refers to how I foolishly haven't driven my scooter in months and now the thing won't start...)
Posted on: Registering with the Police Station
February 22, 2008 at 9:20 AMThanks for the tips Amber! My problem with sentences like... 以後你填好帶過來 (Yǐhòu nǐ tián hǎo dàiguo lái) ...isn't so much on the comprehension side--I can hear it and piece it together fairly easily--but I never seem to be able to produce such sentences. Instead I'd probably choke out something like "先填這張表格，再給我", which may or may not make sense, but is certainly nowhere near as elegant as the construction in the sentence. I have this problem with pretty much all of the, er, complements (?) - the 出來s and 起來s and so on: comprehension, fine. Production? Not happening. Yet. I guess, like with 把 constructions, I just have to make sure I practice a lot more.
Posted on: Registering with the Police Station
February 22, 2008 at 2:51 AMGood content here, but at under 9 minutes the podcast itself is a little short. Have Upper-Intermediates been a little easier lately or am I, heavens forbid, improving?! 之內 may not exactly be upper-intermediate content, but I can't find it used anywhere else in ChinesePod--it and 以內 probably deserve some time. The sentence 以後你填好帶過來 could also be pulled apart a bit--I generally don't have much trouble understanding something like that, but I desperately need help **constructing** such sentences! (After all, what looks like five verbs in a row doesn't come naturally to native English-speakers.)
Posted on: Behind the Scenes at the Beauty Pageant
February 21, 2008 at 10:30 AMPronunciation/ 5th tone query: in this lesson, 公平 is gong1ping2. In "Getting to know the beauty pageant judges", 公平 is gong1ping5. Er... why? Is this contextual, regional, personal preference, or something else? I see issues like this again and again, especially because I live in Taiwan; my current solution is generally use 5th tone ONLY for the 爸爸, 媽媽, etc words, and otherwise just remember tones for every character and pretend 5th tone doesn't exist. How wrong am I in doing so? Where would I sound especially strange?
Posted on: To Love or Be Loved
February 19, 2008 at 9:49 AMDave, you're not alone--I thought this lesson quite difficult as well, but "All You Can Eat and Drink" fairly easy. OK, that lesson did have lots of new vocab, but it was all food. I pretty much understood what was going on on a first or second listen, with a bunch of phrases that I knew were some kind of food. For me "Love or Be Loved" is difficult because it highlights the amazing efficiency of Chinese--"再說，也不是不愛，而是多少的問題。“ HUH?!?!?! I listened to that and my brain came up with "also not is not love", and by the time I recovered the dialogue was pretty much over. Ok, when I can read it I can parse it, but still only with difficulty.
Posted on: I Have Class
February 17, 2008 at 3:11 PMIn Google, "I have class" - 2,200,000 (and the first one is Chinese Pod!) "I have a class" - 458,000 In Vancouver English, we do say "Sorry, I can't be there at 11am--I have class." (I suspect I'd be more likely to say "I've got class.") We could also say "I have a class". To me, "a class" *faintly* implies you don't spend much of your time in class--i.e. you've got a full time job and are taking a class part time. We'll also say "I'm late for class", much in the same way as we'd say "I'm late for work" or "I'm late for school." I guess "class", in North American English, is in whatever grammatical category you can place "work" and "school". Aunty Sue, would "What time do you finish class?" also sound strange to you? Like you were surprised at how "class" is used in North America, I'm surprised it's NOT used that way elsewhere! "Standard" English seems like a meaningless and unnecessarily loaded term to me--American English, Canadian English, British English, Australian English, non-American English (which seems too nebulous to mean anything!), BBC English, Received pronunciation... all much safer and more sensible. (I just had a quick look in a linguistics book, and it spends 4-5 pages rubbishing the idea of standard English.)
Posted on: Chinese New Year Plans
February 7, 2008 at 3:04 AMAn article in Slate, called "How the Grinch Stole Chinese New Year"... http://www.slate.com/id/2183843/ ... talks about the 20th century history of the festival in China. One point that surprised me: the name 春節, or Spring Festival, is new?! (Well, less than 100 years old.) Is that true?! The article says the festival was re-named because the post-1911 government wanted "New Year" to become the same as western new year. The article talks a lot about how the kitchen god has disappeared in mainland China, but to be honest, there's not much of the kitchen god in Taiwan either. Yesterday was rainy and miserable in Taipei; there were some fireworks and firecrackers around, but nowhere near as many as on December 31st. I've never seen the MRT (=subway) as empty. Like the child in the conversation, I find Chinese New Year pretty dull; Lantern Festival is much more entertaining.
Posted on: Hiring a Courier
February 4, 2008 at 1:26 AMQuick point--the sentences in the expansion section are misaligned. Each Chinese sentence actually matches the previous English translation.
Posted on: Flowers and Bugs
March 7, 2008 at 9:04 AMSo, following up on the lesson intro: how do you say bonsai?