User Comments - podster
podster
Posted on: This Coffee is a Ripoff!
April 8, 2015 at 3:47 PMMaybe it's the wrong character. "To set a price" is “定价” ， not "订“, even though they are pronounced the same. "订" does mean order. Probably just a typo in the Chinese that then caused the sentence to be improperly translated.
Posted on: Trade Expos
March 19, 2015 at 1:36 PM从这个网站上：
Phonemica 乡音苑 is a collection of stories in local vernaculars. The stories are contributed by our users, who record, upload and transcribe regional lore: nursery rhymes and childhood games, preparation of specialty foods, humorous anecdotes, local history, and much more.
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Posted on: I Can't Drink
March 19, 2015 at 12:42 PMRe: " Could you let me know which body controls "the official standard of pinyin".
I don't know which body is responsible for ("controls") the official standard.There is probably some Chinese Academy of Language in Beijing. Hanyu Pinyin was created in the mainland and adopted as the standard there.
According to Wikipedia: "The Hanyu Pinyin system was developed in the 1950s based on earlier forms of romanization. It was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times.[2] The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as an international standard in 1982.[3] The system was adopted as the official standard in Taiwan in 2009, where it is used for romanization alone rather than for educational and computer input purposes.[4][5]"
Maybe the footnotes could lead you to the answer to your question.
Posted on: I Can't Drink
March 19, 2015 at 12:01 PMRe: "In general, tone change rules . . . . . .don't have to be written down . . ."
In fact, as far as I know the official standard of pinyin is that tone changes are never represented. Each word has only one way of being written in pinyin, even if it results in the tone being "wrong" in terms of how it would actually be spoken in the context of other words. Note that a given character can represent more than one word, and in such cases sometimes the pronunciations are identical except for the tone, so in that case you would have more than one way of writing the tone for the same character, depending on which word it stands for.
Separately, Gwilym, thanks for the link to Hacking Chinese. That article was an eye-opener, along with the thought provoking Sinosplice article by John that the first article referenced.
Posted on: Trade Expos
March 19, 2015 at 3:40 AMHas anybody worked on transcripts on Phonemica.net? I found their current platform pretty easy to use. Maybe the template is something they would be willing to license.
Posted on: Trade Expos
March 13, 2015 at 4:49 PMRe: " 气 means gas or to be angry. " Matt， I think it might be more useful to think of 气 as meaning "spirit" in this case. The word 买气 is not in my dictionaries, but in common usage it seems to refer more to the willingness of buyers to buy, as opposed to the inherent quality of the thing being sold. In other words, the customer or investor has 买气. Sort of like "animal spirits" at work in the stock market, as opposed to objective valuation. (I did not look at the context in this lesson).
Separately, here is a related lesson that did not make the list:
https://chinesepod.com/lessons/attending-a-trade-show
Posted on: Calm Down Before You Startup
February 10, 2015 at 3:33 AMIs this bug related to the Kindle issue as well? Are you able to see everything on your Kindle? (I am using a Kindle app on an iPad).
Posted on: Calm Down Before You Startup
February 5, 2015 at 1:32 PMI have tried Gwilym's suggestion (on the blog) of sending this and one other lesson to Kindle, but it only pushes through the dialog and not the vocabulary, even though I can see both on my PC screen when I click on on text version.
Posted on: Let Me Sleep a Little Longer
February 5, 2015 at 4:09 AM你们有默契吗？ 嘿嘿
nǐ men yǒu mò qì ma ? hēihēi
Posted on: This Coffee is a Ripoff!
April 9, 2015 at 12:47 PMConstance, thanks for the clarification on use of 定 / 订. I have learned 定价 when used as a noun also. ("Fixed price"). I wasn't aware of the context in this case that the shopowner "thought up" the price on the spot。 If I understand you correctly this is why the verb form 订得 was used. Does that mean that if the price were previously set, for example printed on a menu, that 定得 would be an optional or preferrable word choice?