User Comments - washingtondcmandarincooperative

Posted on: Talking About Dates in Chinese

If you mean the year 2001 (2001 年） you should read it as  二零零一年  (èr líng líng yī nián) 

If, however, you happened to have two thousand and one hammers (or whatever), you would say 两千零一  （liǎngqiānlíngyī).  Note that you only read one zero, not two.  

Posted on: Getting a Pump On! Back and Bicep Workout in the Gym

A spotter is a 确保者

Posted on: Introducing Measure Words 基本量词

There is a "suggest a lesson" link at the left of this page. I'm not sure if anyone is monitoring it. You can also do a search of existing lessons and of the glossary to see if such a lesson has already been done. Finally, under the "TOOLS" tab above you can click on dictionary and type in a term (for example, “当时” and get a list of sample usages and the related lessons from which they are drawn. By the way, hats off to you for maintaining the convention of using pinyin for comments in the Newbie section.

Posted on: What a Lovely Painting

Regarding your first question, the short answer is "no."  This structure does not refer to the contents, ingredients, etc of something.  In this example, "画的是什么呢？", the word 画 is functioning as a verb, not a noun.  So the meaning is not so much "what is in the painting?" as "what does the painting depict" or "what has been painted (in the picture)".  

As to your second question, the answer is also "no", you cannot omit 起来 from this VERB + 起来 pattern.  Here's a Qing Wen on the topic: https://chinesepod.com/lessons/using-%E7%9C%8B-kan-and-%E7%9C%8B%E8%B5%B7%E6%9D%A5-kan-qilai

Posted on: Using "Can" 会、能、可以

The "related lessons" list at the left is never really very useful or comprehensive, nor are the tags.  For anyone who in interested in the same words but treated at an intermediate level:

https://chinesepod.com/lessons/all-about-can-%E8%83%BD-neng%E4%BC%9A-hui%E5%8F%AF%E4%BB%A5-key%C7%90

Posted on: Bank Transactions

At the risk of asking you to "quadruple check" I am going to venture a guess as to why you got marked wrong.  I have a hunch you wrote 他出示账单了吗？ The corrected answer given by the CPod software uses 帐单  instead of 账单.  If so you were indeed correct, but marked wrong because CPod was using a variant writing for the same character 账 / 帐.  No difference in meaning or pronunciation. but the software probably won't accept it the way you wrote it.

Posted on: Dormitory Drama - Part 3

PS: just googled 青椒塞肉 and the very first result was a blog entry with this as the first sentence:

周末送上一道青椒塞肉，俺之前在别处发的时候，有朋友指出，这名字太俗了，应该叫：酿青椒。

So I guess this answers your question in one sense; 塞肉 may be a more common form and 酿肉 is perhaps more formal or a "proper" name.  Another result I saw led me to believe that 塞肉 is used in Shanghai, which was where I believe David and most of the ChinesePod staff at the time were from.  

Posted on: Dormitory Drama - Part 3

I can't answer your question, but I can tell you that you used the wrong character;

赛 as is 比赛 、赛车 is not the same sài as the 塞 in 塞肉, the latter which means "to stuff" and the former means compete.

Posted on: Guide Dogs

请问，有没有人知道怎么翻译 “service dog."  "Therapy dog"呢？ 还有  "comfort animal"

Posted on: Guide Dogs

祝大家狗年旺旺，身体健康。沸沸扬扬财源滚滚。