User Comments - paulinurus

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse

I don't know how valid the advice of 'not thinking in English when learning Chinese' is, and whether or not it is at all possible in learning a second language without associating with one's native language. If your mother tongue is native English, can you learn Spanish without associating the Spanish words with the English words? 

Can adults be like kids learning the mother tongue language from their mum and dad? It is only natural for children not to think in terms of another language since the mother tongue is the only language they know. Can adults learn a foreign language the way children learn? Maybe it is possible if one is plucked out of an English speaking home and abruptly put into a Chinese family home in rural China where no English is spoken anywhere and it is a matter of either staying afloat or drowning. Think Chinese or starve and die!

But living a current comfortable lifestyle, who needs to go through such torturous and perhaps even demeaning bootcamp period just for the sake of learning a foreign language. I suspect also the  people who advise others to not think in terms of one's native language when learning a foreign language are the minority of foreigners who are born with the gift of easily picking up a foreign language via the bootcamp immersion approach. 

Literal translation helps me to remember words by association. For example, it is easier to remember 西瓜 by breaking up the word into 'western + melon' rather than ignoring what 西 or 瓜 means and just take the two characters as a whole to mean water melon. Some people are gifted with memorizing things and need not learn by associaton. They just memorize pairings of characters as one word and that's it!

Literal translation also helps me to understand better the Chinese sentence structure. I just find a whole wealth of learning by literally translating each word in a Chinese sentence. Not only do I get to review the meaning of each character, but also see how two characters will form one word, and how the words themselves are arranged and structured i.e. Chinese grammar. Of course, there are certain Chinese words where it remains a puzzle why the pairing of certain characters could mean a certain word. But I'm sure there is a story (orignin) to the pairing, which when told, the puzzle is solved. So, for me... literal translations rock when learning Chinese!

Posted on: Juiced!

Hmm, the review Cpod fix podcast for this lesson has been truncated. Not all the words in the Vocab were reviewed, and only three theme-word sentences were reviewed.   

Posted on: Funny Business, Part Two

baba,

对，小赵应该赶快跑出来。。。

糊涂账，西方会计一般叫" goodwill" such as Ex-Tyco convicted CEO Dennis Kozlowski's gaudy $2 million toga party for wife Karen's 40th birthday

Posted on: Delegating Tasks

The cog-wheel option to hide the English translation is useful for 'hearing comprehension'.

However, I think there should also be the option to hide the Chinese text. Hiding the Chinese text will provide a very useful exercise for 'speaking comprehension'. 

For instance, I hide the chinese text for the expansion sentence "Go tell everyone - the meeting starts at ten" then test myself whether I can say this sentence in Chinese, then play the sound track to see if I got it right. 

Raygo, RJ, Baba, and others... what are your thoughts on this option?

Posted on: Podcast Language 2

@calkins

I've noticed you have frequently chided poddies comments on the discussion boards, causing disruptions and initiating flame wars. Do keep in mind Cpod ends each podcast with 欢迎你到Chinesepod留言，告诉我们你的想法, and not "only leave those comments which Calkins like"

Posted on: Podcast Language 3

@Mike,

Thanks... you've captured key phrase 俗语  that was left out. 

Posted on: Who are You Looking For?

@shenyajin

哈哈！Maybe because you held chopsticks in your hand?

Posted on: Podcast Language 2

I've now been studying with Cpod for four months, and frankly my experience has not been a happy one, and it looks like by the end of the subscription period I'll be one of those as azzote described "ones that don't fit has already left"

I'll be very straightforward and say that while Cpod's data base has no competition at this time, Cpod can't teach and further more don't listen too well. There is an air of defensiveness and stubborness in the various Cpod's responses to poddies feedback. Such an attitude is fine for the poddies in the newbie or elle levels but upon crossing over to the Intermediate level, they'll face the problems and frustrations as have been voiced by the more vocal poddies.

It is an arrogant attitude of "you should just muddle along not understanding, and that's fine because if you work hard enough on your own, one day everything will clear up for you", and an attitude of "you should accept our slang translations as 100% verified by linguistic experts as contextual treatment best for you when learning Chinese despite the fact it doesn't make sense to you and you're protesting right now".

Of course learning Chinese is not an easy task and you cannot learn Chinese (or any foreign language) if you don't hunker down for self study to learn the vocabulary, listen dozens of times to the dialogues, study the grammar and structure of the sentences, and be patient in your progress. 

However, no amount of self study of the podcasts can relay the meaning of cultural expressions such as the 去去去 and the 你去骗三岁小孩子吧。你有那个本事？used in the Lao Wang's dialogue without someone at Cpod being able to explain what those phrases mean.

There seems to be a focus at Cpod on how to deliver technology of the podcasts rather on how to teach the podcasts. A learning site is a teaching site. I cannot see how technology and rearranging of data can circumvent teaching.   

Posted on: Tea Tasting

*admin edit. Unnecessary continuation of a flame war. Paulinurus and Miantiao, please stop this now! I let your dialogue continue up till this point, now it is simply a distraction to those who wish to communicate on the subject of tea. Matt. ChinesePod Product Manager.

Posted on: Podcast Language 2

The discussions here have also been a very informative one for me and I wish to thank you all who have shared your perspectives .  

I think timslsm said it best on what appears to me as Cpod's method of  ‘teaching' Chinese. It provides you with massive amount of dialogues on a wide range of topics which is unavailable elsewhere. It's up to you on how you use its database to learn Chinese.

There is no formal teaching nor are the lessons structured in a progressive learning manner as in the typical Chinese courses taught in colleges. Cpod is mainly a database supplier, however a very useful one since you can learn Chinese via the ‘natural way' i.e. the ‘Suzuki mother tongue approach'.

The problem is that learning a language as children do is not necessarily a non-frustrating one or functional one for adults. Our brains are already developed and structured in certain ways to learn new things.  For example, I got frustrated with the sentence 你去骗三岁小孩子吧。你有那个本事？ which was translated as "Go try and trick a three-year old child! Can you do that?" which doesn't make sense from an English language context (since, of course you can trick a 3-year old). However, now that Jenny has said that this is a 固定说法 (fixed way of saying things) ie a cultural saying to rebuff someone who tries to deceive you, it now makes sense. But wouldn't it be so nice if this fact had been  mentioned in the podcast? So I agree with those here who said that the natural way may not be the best way to learn Chinese (for adults). Unlike kids who suffer no anxiety not understanding what their parents said, most adults do, especially in the environment of a subscriber member learning a foreign language.  Without the clarification by Jenny there is virtually no way to have known that this is a fixed Chinese saying, and the frustration would have lingered on.

And I agree with Bob that there is no way to internalize a context to place Jenny's dialogue in Chinese if we don't understand the dialogue in the first place, resulting in much of the goodness of the dialogue between John and Jenny being lost.

I'm also a structured thinker/learner as RJ and others here are. Unfortunately I don't have the time nor the patience (perhaps why there is a high turnover of subscribers?) to first study about 140 lessons as timmi did before finding it easy to understand Jenny's dialogue.

So this QW is really helpful, albeit long overdue and please, may more be done in clarifying or translating 'fixed way of saying things in Chinese during the podcasts. Also, thanks again to poddies such as raygo who have shared their transcripts of Jenny's dialogue with us.