User Comments - podster

Posted on: Market Research 3: Assessing the Competition

Thanks, Jenny. I did listen to the expansion sentence and to my ear it seemed that the recording matched the pinyin. So would it be normal to flip the pronunciation around in the same sentence based on the compound word?

I think I learned this word from a teacher from Taiwan, so I remember it as xiě, as the dictionary indicates for a Taiwan pronunciation.

How about the meaning of 血液 ? Is that just a more fancy or clinical sounding term.

Thanks, and don't work too hard during the holiday.

Posted on: Buying a Prepaid Cell Phone Card

I don't live in China so can't claim direct experience, but from what I have seen the user experience, at least as far as average data transmission speed goes, is likely to be better on China Unicom's WCDMA network. Sorry I did not directly answer your question in my first reply. Unicom's 3G should be faster, based on actual research observations by others in China.

One other omission in the lesson: China Telecom also has a 3G mobile service, using the CDMA technology. Be aware that China does not have number portability, so if you change operators later you will not be able to take your cell phone number with you.

Posted on: Buying a Prepaid Cell Phone Card

I think he said that Android would not work on China Mobile, but that is not the case, as you point out. I think he may have been thinking about China Mobile's unusual transmission technology, described in my comment above, which is separate from the operating issue. Many handset makers produce TD-SCDMA handsets. Such handsets are the only ones that can be used with China Mobile's 3G service. These manufacturers include HTC and Samsung, but not Apple. The terms CDMA, TD-SCDMA, and GSM refer to the radio transmission technology, also referred to as a transmission protocol. It is not the same as an operating system, which is what makes the smartphone "smart". Operating systems include Android, iOS (Apple), and Windows Mobile.

Posted on: Teaching English to the Neighbors

我也把她当学生，表现 努力读书的一个中国人。我习惯了看有外国人的照片代表课程上的中国人的情况。

Posted on: Teaching English to the Neighbors

lamartiniere,

I don't remember the specific instance you refer to now, but I think overall the dropping of an English word into the sentence is tolerable and sometimes useful. Sometimes I think its done to be funny, but sometimes, especially when I hear Jenny do it, I think she is guessing (correctly, most of the time) that I don't know the word, and then she will repeat the phrase in full Chinese. Its actually a very effective way of teaching vocabulary, because it catches my attention and I get the Chinese word immediately after I am asking myself, "hey, I wonder what the Chinese word for that is."

As to whether Americans use Chinese to complete there sentences, I think the fair comparison would be Americans who are fluent in Chinese and teaching Chinese people how to speak English. Maybe not a very large population, (and I am not in it) but I wouldn't be surprised if they did the same thing.

Posted on: Market Research 3: Assessing the Competition

I agree. I thought this was one of the best lessons ever for useful business vocabulary. As usual, CPod kept if from being too dry. Unexpected drama: Faulty projector, unreadable font size -- oh, the humanity!

Posted on: Market Research 3: Assessing the Competition

I've been curious about this question about words with "blood" since you pointed it out.  Too bad nobody knowledgable has weighed in yet.  Not only do the tones vary, but so does the spelling (xue/xie).   My guess is that the pronunciation of 血in this case depends on the compound of which it is part.  In other words, in this sentence the word never appears in isolation, but as part of words for "donate blood" "blood-liquid" , and "transfuse blood."  So the pronunciation is not really optional, it depends on what the adjacent characters are. 

My Mandarin popup gives the following:

献血 xiànxuè  "to donate blood"

血液  xuèye  "blood"

输血 shūxuè "to transfuse blood" 

For the word 血by itself the dictionary gives lots of choices: xuè is the first one, but "informal colloquial and Taiwan pronunciation xiě, also pronounced xuě." are offered as alternatives. 

I'll have to go back and see if I can tell wheher the speaker's recording matches the pinyin given in the transcript. 

Im also not sure what the difference between 血 and 血液 is, but I'll guess that the latter refers to a certain quantity of blood, or blood as you might find in a container for storage. 

Posted on: Buying a Prepaid Cell Phone Card

TD-SCDMA is 时分-同步码分多址存取. You might notice the CDMA making up the last four letters, and it also stands for Code Division Multiple Access. For some reason the translation I found include two extra characters, at the end, 存取 cúnqǔ, meaning access, but when I looked up the word without those two characters I still found CDMA, as you wrote. I would think the longer version would be the more faithful translation, but I will guess that everyone in China just uses the letter abbreviations anyway.

TD-SCDMA is unique to China. China Mobile uses it for their 3G Service, but maybe some people are not aware that China Mobile claims a 3G offering because it has relatively few subscribers, or because it does not use one the two international 3G standards.

Unicom is the only operator where you can get the iPhone in China, but China Telecom is about to start offering the iPhone as well. Many people use iPhones on China Mobile's GSM network, but they can not enjoy 3G services, as there is no TD-SCDMA Apple product. The users' iPhones would have come from the grey market, possibly from Hong Kong. China Mobile does not sell iPhones.

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

Good to know that 他生我的气 means "he got angry with me" since I would have guessed that the meaning was the other way around. I didn't realize 气 was a verb, even though I have know the term 生气 for a long time. I thought it took the function of an object, but now I see it has meaning as a verb also (to get angry or to anger). I should have figured it out because I learned the phrase 气死我了！on CPod. I used to think of 生气 as giving rise to steam, which nicely fits with the English "get steamed up" and the cartoon characters with steam coming out their ears.

But I think you can say either 帮忙他 or 帮他的忙， correct? I suppose 忙 is not a verb, so maybe it does not fit into your pattern. How a bout 拍马屁 ==〉 拍他的马屁？ I'm pretty sure you can not say 拍马屁他， Another example from the animal kingdom: 炒他的鱿鱼。

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

I will respectfully disagree about the role of "personality / 'personalities' " in the podcasts. I (and I think many others) value CPod for teaching us spoken Chinese, which means person to person contact, and often includes talking about oneself. Similarly, I have always disagreed with comments that CPod employees should not be allowed to talk about their various preferences, or opinions (posted by those listeners that don't agree with them.) I always enjoy hearing Jenny, John, David, and others talk about their experiences, especially when they do it in Chinese or some mix of Chinese and English that helps me to learn how to describe experiences too.

I had the impression that CPod was treating us to some new formats, not abandoning the tried and tested lesson format. I believe the podcasts that elicited these comments were presented as "holiday specials" but perhaps this was not made clear enough as I see others are wondering where the grammar tab, etc. went to.