User Comments - podster

Posted on: You Should Watch Game of Thrones

re: " . . .do some set phrases or situations call for xie3 and saying xue4 would be a mistake?"  Excellent question. Let's add that to the list of things for Constance to address when she gets back.

Posted on: Which country are you from?

Hi, I am excited for you that you are learning Chinese. You should not put your name and age on the Internet though. You can ask your Mom or Dad or an adult in your family to explain why. Keep up the good work with studying Chinese!

Posted on: 中元普渡-Ghost Month

敬鬼神而远之

Posted on: You Should Watch Game of Thrones

Here's another example of a character that changes pronunciation without changing meaning, or if so only subtly. We probably all learned 给 as "give" (gěi). However, in the compound 所给, (suǒjǐ) meaning "given" (as in "in the given examples . . .") it is pronounced as jǐ. My dictionaries have no entry for "suǒgěi" so I assume that is not a valid alternative pronunciation for 所给.

However, in the compound 给予 , meaning to "give" (usually some abstract thing to somebody or something) you will find the word alternately pronounced as jǐyǔ and gěiyǔ.  

My sense is that this is somewhat analogous to the case of 血， where the same speaker might pronounce it differently depending on the level of formality of the situation or technical nature of a compound word,  abstraction / intangibility of what the language is describing, or specific character compounds. 

Posted on: You Should Watch Game of Thrones

You are correct, it would not be wrong.  Interestingly, in another CPod  lesson (疑病症  )in the banter you can clearly hear Jenny say chūxuè at 4:34, but then it is transcribed as chūxiě by helenshen_counselor in reply to a question in the comments section.   This was recorded when the entire CPod team was still based in Shanghai, for your reference.  Jenny is a Shanghai native.  I don't know about Helen.  

https://chinesepod.com/lessons/%E7%96%91%E7%97%85%E7%97%87

I really would like to get Constance or someone else from CPod in Taiwan to weigh in to give you a more definitive answer about usage in Taiwan.  Hello CPod team, are you listening? 

Posted on: You Should Watch Game of Thrones

Actually 已 and  己 are not the same character.  They are written differently.  Very slight difference, but the third and final stroke of  已 yǐ starts a tiny bit higher than the similar stroke in 己 jǐ.  These two are frequently confused characters, and on the computer it is difficult to see the difference.  

Your second example, 行, is the same character in both compounds, but with a different meaning and different pronunciation, as you intended to illustrate.  

血has a single meaning, blood, but alternate pronunciations depending on different factors, as discussed.

Posted on: You Should Watch Game of Thrones

Nabeshima120, I was replying to your statement that "Therefore when you type xie into the pinyin output and you get 血 it's safe to assume that's how it's pronounced in the 標準 form." Did I misunderstand you? It seemed that you were saying that entering a given pinyin and seeing if it returned the character was a way of "verifying" that the pronunciation represented by the pinyin input was THE standard (or標準 as you wrote.) As to your examples, ( 通行 / 銀行you are confusing alternate pronunciations of the same word (e.g., 血 --blood) with characters that have multiple pronunciations with different meanings (多音字.) I deliberately tried to avoid this misunderstanding in my reply to liaowarrior (below): "血 always means blood (it is not a word with multiple readings where the meaning changes) but if you wanted to say "bleed" you might say chūxiě 出血 but for a scientific or medical term like "blood cell" it would be xuèxìbāo 血细胞." I didn't mean to imply that pinyin is normally used to represent regional variations. As far as I know it is not. In fact, it is quite rigid, even beyond representing the syllables of "standard" putonghua. You will see occasional confusion here among newbie or elementary CPod users because the standard of pinyin is to not change the tone marks to represent tone changes as spoken in the context of adjacent words. ("sandhi" -- contextual phonological changes). Were you replying to my question aboutㄒㄧㄝ representing the same pronunciation as"xie", which you said it does not? (My zhuyin is very rusty, and even though I've been exposed to a lot of pinyin I wouldn't bet my life that I am pronouncing the "x" absolutely correctly. )

Posted on: How Much is that Check Shirt?

Actually it's in the expansion section, not exercises. Click on the red link below the sentence that says "show translation" to reveal the meaning of奥利奥要和牛奶一起吃。 (奥利奥 is a famous brand of cookie).

Posted on: You Should Watch Game of Thrones

Nabeshima120, Okay, just for fun I decided to test your theory.  I typed xue and got 血.  Then I typed xie and got 血.  So it seems that is not a reliable test for which form is "standard."  By the way, Hanyu Pinyin is also an accepted standard in Taiwan.  Re "neither xie nor xue": wouldn't ㄒㄧㄝ most closely map to "xie"?  Its not like it is "somewhere in between" is it?  

Posted on: You Should Watch Game of Thrones

liaowarrior, It's definitely not just a "Taiwan thing" to pronounce血 as xiě. I think any dictionary will show the "standard" pronunciation as xuè, with xiě listed as a "colloquial" variant. How they are used depends on the context though. 血 always means blood (it is not a word with multiple readings where the meaning changes) but if you wanted to say "bleed" you might say chūxiě 出血 but for a scientific or medical term like blood cell it would be xuèxìbāo 血细胞.

That said, I'm certainly not an expert on Chinese linguistics, so happy to  be proven wrong if anyone has heard one pronunciation used exclusively in Taiwan and another elsewhere.  I can say that I have seen Chinese speakers who are natives of the same city pronounce one word in two different ways respectively, so it's hard to draw conclusions from limited samples or anecdotes.