User Comments - luobinzhenmei

Posted on: Language Power Struggle

What counts as polite or rude varies even in the same country.  I know a Chicago native who moved to North Carolina and thought that the teenage boy who held a door for her was being sarcastic.  Of course he wasn't.

So I guess the lesson for us Lao Wai is to just assume that EVERY Chinese is being friendly and polite, and most of the time we will be right.

Posted on: Language Power Struggle

很好玩的对话。我们已经很多次练习这个对话。

可是我们根本太懒惰的。结束是说英文。

Posted on: Chinglish in Reverse and University Culture

Wow.  So much Zhonglish is the same for completely different sets of people.  We are definitely going to add

"What the 什么?" to our vocabulary. We used to say

该死的。

Eunica, thank you for the Chinese, and Kimiik, for the picture and explanation of the phrase 高架。

Posted on: Characters in the Desert and Chinese Kitchens

We never thought of trying cookies, but crepes do well cooked in a wok.  We use the "fuzzy logic" rice cooker to steam baozi and other kinds of dumplings and from kimiik's pictures we now know we can try some kinds of cake. In China our rice cooker is more important than having a stove.

Can we actually see the characters in the Gobi from Google? We're off to try it.

Posted on: You talking about me?

We've heard 说老王，老王就来了。And we thought that 老王really was a term for The Devil, like Lucifer or The Dickens. So if 曹操 is the name, who is/ was 老王?

Posted on: Hawaii

Ken, 浪 很高 is probably translated as "The waves are awesome" What do other people think?

Posted on: Hawaii

Henning, 一次一个德国留学生告诉了我们因为美国学生经常给她微笑，她不喜欢，很怀疑“她们要什么？” 文化不同。 因为中国人经常开玩笑，连我们们的笑话很差，我最喜欢中国人。 我们也喜欢复威夷和复威夷的人。

Posted on: Night Cat

Amber, Thank you. We went back and listened to other xuan, quan pronunciations and they all sound more like ahn than ehn to us. So shame on us for not noticing before. We love The Fix because it really gets us to notice when we say it differently. Kettle, We live in Northampton, Massachusetts. But any college town will have native Chinese speakers. Just contact the Chinese Departments about meeting people for practice or for someone the teachers recommend. At Smith College we have "Chinese table" that is pretty much open to anyone who wants to speak Chinese at any level, Chinese tutors who have open office hours and will be happy to chat if there aren't any students waiting with homework questions, and Chinese restaurants with waitpeople who are Mandarin speakers. Plus Northampton is a great town. Where is your least-diverse home?

Posted on: Night Cat

Kettle, We're in an East Coast state with plenty of chances to speak and we are SURE that whenever we make up a sentence in Chinese it will sound odd to a native speaker, but did you every listen to a little kid talk? Don't worry about it. Chinese are generally very forgiving and it is good for our characters to experience being laughed at.

Posted on: Night Cat

Waaa. We take it back. Listening to recent lessons, 宣 is pronounced to rhyme with 传，chuan, and there is a 全in a sentence than also has an "ahn" instead of an "ehn" ending. Now we'll have to learn to listen (and say) the differences between x and sh and between ch and q, because the vowel sounds won't tell us the difference. Merry Christmas to everyone.