User Comments - podster

Posted on: Prenatal Checkup, Part 2

An older lesson on this topic from the Pregnancy Series:

https://chinesepod.com/lessons/pregnancy-series-5-super-babies-and-ultrasounds

Kind of surprising that this does not show up as a "related lesson", whereas lessons about night life and working out in the gym do.  Maybe they are related by vocabulary or grammatical patterns rather than topic.  Or perhaps the suggestions are machine generated?

Posted on: 疫情中的网络教学

我也不熟悉 线下 这个词 的意思。我想问一下， 如果我有一个下载的录课，那么不是 面授而不是 线上， 还有其他词可以表示这种方法码？ 

Posted on: COVID-19, Rumors and Beer

I have a question about the first and the third lines of the dialogue.  I noticed while doing dictionary lookups that both  新款  and  款新  can be words.  However, in your mouse hover popups they are parsed as separate words instead of compound characters in both lines of the dialogue.  If I understand correctly, this is a mistake in the first case: instead of the words 新 and 款 being defined separately there should be a definition for the compound 新款 (new version)  in the first line.  However, in the second case I think your parsing is correct, with 款 serving as a measure word, so 四款 means "four types" (of new flavors.)  Please let me know if I am right.  Thanks.  

试试这新款啤酒。
 
科罗娜出了四款新口味。
 

Posted on: COVID-19, Rumors and Beer

I think both hosts missed the mark a bit in trying to explain the meaning by means of idiomatic English "equivalents. " 狗嘴里吐不出象牙 （the version I found in the dictionary) is neither the equivalent of "to have one's foot in one's mouth" nor "cat's got your tongue." I would translate the Chinese as "don't expect elegant words from a vulgar person. " Maybe I don't fully understand how the phrase is used in this context. It sort of felt like the phrase was shoe-horned into the lesson for the sake of having us learn a new expression, and was a bit of a non-sequitur. Maybe the female character's intent was to say "别乱说 ." Perhaps the sentiment in the context of this dialogue is "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."  Or maybe she was teasing that she misunderstood him because he was too uneducated to speak clearly?  

Posted on: COVID-19, Rumors and Beer

Uh-oh!  I see somebody tried to fix the mistake that kennifaye12 caught, but actually made it worse!  Now instead of "preventing the beer" which, as kennifaye 12 pointed out should have been "avoiding the beer" the lesson description has been changed to " . . . that didn't stop people from preventing the rumors from flying around."  I am pretty sure the edit was intended to be " . . .that didn't prevent rumors from flying around."

Posted on: Prenatal Checkup, Part 1

Related lesson from the previous "Pregnancy Series" here:

https://chinesepod.com/lessons/pregnancy-series-3-prenatal-checkup

Posted on: How Relaxing

Here is the relevant page on John Pasden's Chinese Grammar Wiki:

https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/%E7%9D%80

Posted on: COVID-19, Rumors and Beer

I really liked this lesson and I am glad it finally came out.  I am also dealing with working from home and putting out work that I wish were better.  ("Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.")  So I can certainly forgive the weird voice-overs to cover over mistakes.  We don't need Hollywood production values if we can get a serviceable Chinese lesson.  

All that said, I do agree that there was way too much English in the banter.  Especially digression and rambling into psychological analysis, all in English.  It was a bit like the lesson on the Iran nuclear deal, which had some gratuitous political analysis, in English.   I know you guys are striving for the right balance.  Personally I also find the lessons where all the "banter" is in Mandarin but is so obviously scripted and not true banter a bit disappointing.  I would not  want you to feel you can never go off-script and eliminate the genuine and natural conversation.   

Anyway, keep up the good work.  I always enjoyed the early lessons with Ken, but he was not immune from rambling on a bit.  

Posted on: 武汉：千万人口城市揿下重启键

Joshua, please re-read the comment.   "70 million deaths" is a bad translation.  Wrong by a couple orders of magnitude. 

Also, can I infer that you wrote this script in the first week of April? Maybe to avoid confusion in future you could have the text read something like "as of April 6 . . ." or some such. 

Sadly, in this case, the "global" numbers cited do look very much like the US numbers as of the date of publication of this lesson.  

Posted on: 宅经济的发展

This is a lesson about some of the service businesses that provide convenience for customers in China.   It seems wholly appropriate to include the names of such companies, their logos, videos of how their service is provided, etc.   I can easily imagine ChinesePod's students in China finding this quite useful.  I could also imagine the names of these companies coming up in conversations with Chinese people overseas.  Also, Cpod students who are business people looking to compete with or invest in such companies would be interested in these "product placements" in this particular lesson.  I highly doubt that ChinesePod is receiving advertising money from the companies mentioned or featured, so I don't think it is fair to call them product placements.