User Comments - tramov

Posted on: Stopped at the Gate

Most important point is to keep the security guard at your home / office building happy.

This way your mail always shows up -- even if its horribly mis addressed.

And they like to gossip -- which is handy if you are looking to find out how much another tenant pays in rent.

Posted on: Battling Internet Addiction

Listening to the dialogue I only heard the over protective Chinese mother.

So this episode was not about internet addiction, but how Chinese mothers smother their children (and turn them into useless people). 

On the other hand: still trying to get my daughters to watch less telly -- I have for now unplugged the cable. In their immense boredom they picked up a book instead.

Posted on: I don't want it!

Hi alwingate, Different learners need different systems. I had to learn BPMF as I started learning Chinese in Taiwan. Its best compared to Hiragana/Katakana in Japanese. For foreigners like me its a headache as you have to master a set of characters that is not actually in daily use (if you ignore typing Chinese). Although sometimes you see advertising that uses rare characters with the BPMF next to it , similar to what the Japanese do with their traditional kanji. For me PinYin comes easier when I am trying to type something. I can usually build the right combination from the sounds in my head -- trying to do the same with the BPMF on the keyboard is much, much slower. But for young learners (4,5 years old) BPMF is easier -- they don't know the English script either and BPMF is a good introduction into writing characters by hand. For teaching materials its great that you can print the pronunciation of a character next to it in small print without affecting the layout of the text. And as for learning Taiwanese -- no good methods exist really. Best is to spend lots of time with the family at the dinner table, over many years.

Posted on: Lesson

The exercises for this lesson seem broken, it gives an error on loading.