User Comments - wshoey

Posted on: Celebrating a Baby's First Month

thanks for another good lesson, guys. the timing is great. my chinese teacher just had a baby last week. 

a tiny criticism....john, your persistent use of "OK" while speaking chinese in podcasts, somewhere along the way, may have caused me to use OK all the time when I'm speaking chinese, and I think it annoys some chinese people. they feel like I'm not really speaking chinese and have occasionally corrected me. this is not really your fault -- i'm a thinking human being and could have decided earlier to cut myself off from "OK", and i'm doing it now.

i dunno, though. maybe the chinese teachers here might have some input. does it sound weird to drop "OK" all the time in conversation? do any chinese do that? i haven't met any who do but maybe it's a regional thing. 

thanks!

Posted on: 给力

this word is easy enough to understand. it just means awesome. 

it's "不给力vable" that i don't get. can anyone explain? 

Posted on: So (adjective) that...

hahahahaha.....this is hilarious. but trying to translate it I don't know how to use 得 in this sentence....if we said ni muqin name lao, ta de nian jian dou you moxi de zhaopian (你母亲那么老,她的年鉴都有摩西的照片), would that have the same meaning here? Or can we/should we use the 得 to really hammer in the causal relationship between the two halves of the sentence? I just don't know how to make the 得 when we've got to include the pronoun after it.

Thanks for this Qingwen!

Posted on: Band Practice

yeah, thanks for this lesson, chinesepod!

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

the voice acting on this lesson I think is really good. the younger woman's voice is interesting to listen to. actually that goes a long way in encouraging me to listen over and over. john and jenny both have interesting voices, too, which is what makes them good hosts. (and connie)

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

thanks johnb. very simple. now i understand.

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

oh yeah, bodawei, speaking of differences between AmE and International English, even the word cheeky strikes me as a little weird from the AmE perspective (or Australian English or BrE or whatever you want to call it). I'm trying to think of what we would use as an alternative. Maybe sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek.

knowing how difficult it is to teach english with these regional differences, i would like to give a nod to the chinesepod teachers for teaching chinese with what has got to be even more complicated regional diffs. what what.

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

asdf56, thanks for the input. yeah, i realize that. i'm not planning on going out and tacking tamade onto everything i say. actually, i wouldn't say curse words in chinese at this stage.

but i also wouldn't, for example, try to explain the great features of a rice cooker in chinese, or explain that someone's performance at work hasn't been good, or tell a story about a frog prince. i'm definitely at the language-absorption phase with all of this upper-intermediate stuff. i'm at the basic functionality and being able to maintain a simple convo with my actual speaking.

but that doesn't mean i don't want to understand what i hear and be able to integrate it into my knowledge of the language for future use. yeah, i get it, people who swear sound dumb. i agree. but people who sit in a tiny dining room and force each other to down shot after shot of warm beer until they're all on the verge of puking (or are actually going to the bathroom to puke) while shouting gao3si3diao4, sha3diao3, whatever, are not exactly sitting at the nexus of human rationality and admirability. but they are my friends and coworkers.

sharesindavid, thanks, maybe i'll check that out sometime.

pretzellogic, you seem to have understood my quandary perfectly. thanks, i will happily go that route; i guess it's not such a bad one after all. gaosidiao.

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

haha...bodawei, thank you for explaining that you were being cheeky...i was worried that in what i wrote i really came across as non-native...as for "arse", i gotta second pretzellogic in saying that i thought the word was just a toned-down version of "ass". if an american ever said "arse" I think i would give her/him a kind of confused stink-eye expression (just because it would sound like she was pretending to be British or something). an ass is also a pretty light insult in AmE, but if you add a hole onto that you've got a pretty stinging insult.

RCK, gao3si3diao4 is definitely not the meaning you're fishing for...diao is definitely fourth tone (掉, i think), and i know from others' explanation that this one doesn't have super profane meaning; I think this one is just a little bit iffy in terms of being able to say it in front of grandma; not super nasty...I think it's like OMG more or less but I'm not sure.

pretz, thanks to the well developed legion of chinese geeks on these boards, i know that the likelihood of me being a trailblazer on this front is zip, but when i do learn the 字 for this phrase i'll be sure to post em here...or if somebody would post them for us that would be pretty rad.

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

yeah, i could buy a book or seek other resources. the thought did pass through my brain. thanks for pointing me to these resources.

i still argue for the point. more than a few friends of mine can't seem to open their mouths with out saying "gao3si3diao", but i don't know what it means. it seems like they're all using it the way i would say "jesus christ" on it's own in english. or "my god".

the reason i posted the suggestion is i couldn't find the meaning last nite and still can't find it...i don't see it on the wikipedia article you referenced or on nciku. these are my 2 bunk resources because i don't have a snazzy iphone with 6 million apps.

am i alone on this one? if i am i'll just shut my trap.