User Comments - zhenlijiang

Posted on: How're You Doing? 得

frognotinawell, I started trying to answer your question on
录得挺顺利的。
Lù de tǐng shùnlì de.
but realized I wasn't 100 percent clear myself.
So rather than tell lies, have decided to bump your question up and let an expert take it instead!  Sorry.

Posted on: Lessons and Comment Policy

I was just about to make a non-content-related post in a lesson discussion, in the knowledge that the new policy if really enforced, would assure of it getting deleted within 10 hrs.  So it occured to me that the rules, depending on how they are enforced, might actually end up encouraging more offensive posts and personal attacks. I've said before, being trusted keeps us good.

Being unable to delete our own words later on has kept us more thoughtful and cautious than we would have been otherwise. But if punishment by deletion is going to loom overhead all the time, I'm afraid we could be seeing a lot more ill-advised "I don't care, it's going to get deleted anyway" posts made in moments of rage. Hope I'm wrong.

Posted on: No TV Before Your Test!

Changye, very glad to have so many specific examples counter to my assumptions! Thank you very much for providing your personal background. You make Japanese education sound very good ...

Posted on: Summer at ChinesePod

Chris, again, apologies for the snippiness. I'm not dismissing all the older material in my backlog of course. The point about CPod lessons is that the creators work very hard to keep them current and fresh. So the latest ones are often more relevant than a lesson on the same topic from 2 years ago--that's how fast China is moving and changing, right? So--not that I should have to explain this to anybody, but--to me the newest lessons are always going to be priority study material no matter how long it's taking me to do the older ones. Also I'm the same as Henning. I don't listen to Newbie and Ele lessons so on those days I'm "drawing a blank" (I will then turn to other things, such as my backlog, to study that day). I would prefer to know which days they are going to be because that means my time is going to be spent differently.

Posted on: Summer at ChinesePod

Chris, CPod likes to (used to, anyway) say "Mandarin on your terms". I guess this would also be in response to Cinese above, but why should other people be dictating to me how I go through the lessons here? I didn't know I was not permitted to go to the latest lessons as long as I have a backlog of unstudied lessons in my level (what if I've skimmed through and decided I don't want to study some of them?), or that people like me should wait until the end of the week to listen to the lessons. That's a little hard to understand. And what do you guys have against a regular schedule? Sorry if this sounds really snippy. I think you can see my point too though.

Posted on: Lessons and Comment Policy

Mm, Raygo, was wondering what you might have to say about this ... fun to hear you go all English!  hahaha

Keeping a community (an organism) not just alive but thriving isn't as simple as, say, growing rosemary and basil in a planter is it. Myself, I was feeling like diversity on the boards had been lost recently (my personal take is that a lot of it went out with Poems With Pete).  I think CPod have good reasons for making the comments policy changes, and hope that they do result in more diversity and satisfaction for more people. I would also hope that a little digression, within reason, will not bring about swift and personal punishment. Like I say, I think this is an organism and as such, if it's stifled it will ail and die.

Posted on: No TV Before Your Test!

Changye, of course that's true. (^^)  People all over the world including Macau and Taiwan can know about high school dances in that way can't they. Tvan said that the Japanese girl likely routinely did those things, so I wanted to point out such school dances are not at all a part of normal Japanese high school life, as I think you agree. When I tell other Japanese about the dances we went to my audience is always captivated at the peek into the very foreign American high school culture.

In Japanese education as I see it, the educators don't get that people have many dimensions, many interests (they should at least be encouraged, at school, to have many interests!) and are often multi-talented. I think in a way (similar perceptions exist I think in Korean society?) people are reared to fear being center of too much attention, conditioned from youth not to want to be outstanding in as many things as possible. So if you're an excellent athlete you're not expected to also want to be a straight-A student or have plans to become a doctor or whatever. Repeating myself, but it's folly, a terrible shame.

Back to dancing in high school, I read a post you made somewhere else about your "folk-dancing" club activities and the high school "madonna"--a very Japanese experience, albeit from the past ... very sweet, hehe.

Posted on: No TV Before Your Test!

Tvan, so sorry to disappoint but I'm afraid the Japanese girl you hosted just happened to be remarkable, an exception--not the norm among products of Japanese education. I don't know her background but would guess she'd had the benefit of a different perspective; likely experience overseas, perhaps her parents were different in some way.

Of the many glaring flaws of the Japanese system, I complain quite a bit about the lack of interest in nurturing well-rounded students, the inability on the part of educators to conceive that there can be such things as student-athletes, student-athlete-artists, etc. What happened to 文武両道 bunbu-ryoudou, (obviously in Chinese 文武双全  wénwǔshuāngquán, 文武兼备 wénwǔjiānbèi or the chengyu 能文能武 néngwénnéngwǔ meaning excelling in both literary and military arts. We use it now to mean achieving both academically and athletically)? I always say. In Japan, say you're a boy in middle school and you've been a star player on your local baseball, or soccer (football, to most of the world) team, showing real promise, it's likely then that you'll be encouraged to concentrate on the sports to the extent that your studies can suffer. And the moms suffer along with them, expected to sacrifice all their Saturdays and Sundays driving, preparing rice balls, running around doing chores for the teams--it's done of out love for your kids of course, but still ...

Anyway, you're not encouraged to pursue both and be all that you can be! I don't understand why we don't take clues there from the US--your young people are told in no uncertain terms that of course they can. When our media hears of top Olympic or professional athletes from the US, say who keep 4.0 GPAs as pre-med students, they report it as a "wow, only in America" kind of story. It never occurs to anybody that we should be telling our kids the same thing. Shallow, short-sighted, shameful!

As for high school dances in the US, I'm quite certain that is one of those very foreign things to Japanese kids. So if your guest did not go into shock, she's just a really even-keel teenager, or had already seen it firsthand, which seems to confirm she has overseas experience.

I've told Japanese people countless times, a US university doesn't want a 4.0 GPA student who does nothing but sit in his room all the time and study, but would much rather have, say a 3.75 student who also excels in a sport, is active in student government, is interested in the arts and involved in the community. When I say this, people look at me like ????. They just don't get it.

Though I grew up in Japan I myself am not a product of the system. I attended international school and our curriculum was American. Besides, it was ages ago that I was in school. So I'm not speaking from personal experience. If I need to be corrected pls don't hesitate, fellow Japanese poddies. And by complaining about the Japanese system I am not saying that all our people turn out flawed, or robotic (we know that's not true!). And stating the obvious again, but of course I'm in no way superior to fellow Japanese who were educated in the Japanese system.

Posted on: Ice Cream

oops Bodawei, wasn't reading carefully. Yes I'm with your wife on green tea VS red bean.

Posted on: Ice Cream

I think you can find both green tea, 抹茶 matcha (variant sp. maccha) and red bean, 小豆 azuki (adzuki) flavored ice cream in many Japanese restaurants. Haagen-Dazs does both as well as other Japanese ingredients, in their ice creams and desserts--but I'm not sure how Japan-local these products are, how widely they're available overseas. Found a blog (Canadian in Japan) talking about such things, it's not very recent but pretty informative:

http://liapas.com/blog/2005/06/18/virtual-haagen-dazs-japanese-classic-parfait

btw I'm Japanese and appreciate matcha but don't care much for green tea ice cream. And I LOVE ice cream. Red bean is better, probably because it just goes better with cream/milk.  （＾ｖ＾）

billgloveruk--冰棍儿 bīnggùnr, ice (on a) stick.