User Comments - podster

Posted on: Consoling the Bereaved

also, give a listen to "Intermediate - Car Crash" starting at 8.50

Posted on: The Little Tadpoles in Search of Their Mother

Is there a concise explanation of 的/ 得/ 地 somewhere on the site? I know it comes up fairly regularly as a question. Examples always help. I'm afraid I wouldn't know a modifying adverbial adjunct if it jumped up and bit me. ;-)

Posted on: The Little Tadpoles in Search of Their Mother

Yes, I think that's closest to the meaning, if a bit odd looking in English. I'd vote for "your mother is white-bellied" as the best translation. As for the "Pale Face" sample sentence, I just had a vision of Chinese people lurking on this site to learn English, and ending up speaking pidgin English as did the stereotyped Hollywood Indians in shows like The Lone Ranger. I think I've been known to slip into "kiddie Chinese" every once in a while when talking to adults.

I agree this is a great lesson. I want to memorize it too.

Posted on: Studying Chinese

all right, all right, already!  Can we learn some Chinese?  I would be interested in examples of words are phrases that are in very common usage but not "technically correct," along with an exmple of the way it's supposed to be.  I have come across a few of these, but can't call any to mind just now.

Thanks, CPod community, for making me so edumacated!

Posted on: Studying Chinese

Here is my interpretation:

In the example (你在学中文吗？nǐzàixuézhōngwénma? ）refers to somebody who is currently a student of Chinese. In other words, an ongoing condition, not merely at this moment. The second case (你现在学中文吗？nǐxiànzàixuézhōngwénma? ) could mean the same thing, but would also be the more likely choice if you walked in on someone who was looking at a book, and you wanted to ask "are you studying Chinese (just now)" (as opposed, for example, to studying a chemistry book, because the speaker can't see which book it is.)

I can think of an expanded version of this question that might make a good Qing Wen topic, but don't want to muddy the issue here.

Posted on: Detective Li 1: The Bath House Murder

Hard for me to follow after just listening, but I also like the idea of the "reader's theater" with the narration thrown in too.  I'll try to keep up with this one, so I am not at risk of "spoilers" in the comments sections.  Do I need to revisit "Doing Business in the Bath House" for clues?  Is that David in the picture? 

Posted on: Mild Swearing

I think Chinese Pod was only a year or two old when I first started listening. Those shows with Ken and Jenny were what got me hooked. Maybe the lack of structure was made it seem so different and easy to access. I can see the logic behind revising and standardizing them, but I do think future poddies will be missing out on something too.

Posted on: Hard Drive Storage

At upper intermediate level I think we have to be ready to learn to understand people who don't speak like CCTV newscasters. That is a strength of Chinese Pod's offerings, in my humble opinion.

Posted on: Hard Drive Storage

I always used to think of stuff on the hard drive as being "in memory." I am not an expert. My experience with computers dates back to science fiction and Batman's "bat computer." (an early iteration of Google).

As for 优盘 , I see the character 优 yōu means "superior" so I wonder if some marketing genius coined that Chinese term ("superior drives") to promote flash memory "drives." (Which brings up another point; it seems strange to call them "drives" when they have no moving parts.)

Okay, quiz for today: what is "cloud drive" in Chinese? Would it be 云盘？ （For those that don't know, cloud drive refers to cloud computing and is the virtual "drive" where you store your data "in the cloud (Internet)" by using the server of a service provider such as Amazon.) What's the Chinese word for "streaming?"

Posted on: Living in Nanjing

I just had this conversation with someone who heard the same awful thing about the form of address 小姐。 I jokingly told him that we could just address everyone as 同志 (comrade, a wonderfully egalitarian and now sadly archaic form of address), although that word has also been appropriated to mean homosexual. (You can't win) I know that 做小姐 means to become a concubine / mistress / (insert derogatory term here) or serve as a prostitute, but I think that avoiding the term 小姐 altogether is something that, as Jason suggests, only naive foreigners obsess about.

I haven't yet made the leap to using 美女。 It feels too much like a come on ("hey， cutey！"), although I realize that young people use it quite freely, (along with 帅哥 ） without any ulterior motive.

Full disclosure: I don't live in China, so probably talking through my hat here. Have any of you guys gotten a big slap yet?