User Comments - zhenlijiang

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse

hahaha, raygo--I almost missed that. It isn't the first time I've had to do this recently so just let me say first 没关系没关系！

其实... 我是女的。 And I'm not offended. And if you are in the habit of addressing ladies as bro, I guess that's cool too!

Posted on: The Final Show

uh ... nothing. sorry.

Posted on: Dubai

The article reminds me of Pleasure Island (for the expats that is.  for the "slave class", yet a different story altogether).

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse

raygo--实在是惭愧之至。我这个人哪儿雄辩？ haha, I know postprandial eloquence = littering.  Oops, I am postprandial again now. Better stop writing immediately.

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse

OK, I'm not half-asleep now. Because they won't help elucidate anything, I continued my ramblings here in case anyone's interested and has a lot of time, haha.

dangrayson, I'm pretty sure those two sentences don't work though it would be nice to have a pro concur. It is 你这个人 as one unit. I do think the combination of Pete's and Raygo's explanations is quite comprehensive!

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse

Read over the last post, should have realized before I actually posted, the third paragraph makes very little sense. I feel compelled to apologize for it. I'm sorry. I should be asleep now really but had too much to eat for dinner and was trying to digest it before I went to bed. Anyway. Sorry for all the rambling.

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse

Hmm, interesting.  I see things a bit differently I guess because I straddle between feeling like a native English speaker/thinker and feeling I have a perfect outsider's view of English--so that very often it makes perfect sense to understand the Chinese in quite "literal" (literal is probably an inaccuracy though) English terms. From this perspective anyway, a quite "literal" English understanding does often work much better than many of you native English speakers seem to think (although I admit it may be partly my Japanese brain supplementing the understanding w/out my realizing it, I'll have to examine that sometime). This is why I bother studying Chinese in English in the first place.  I've said before, a lot of things just click better with an English understanding--despite Japanese having what seem to be advantanges such as overlapping vocab using identical hanzi for instance.

However, I am positively not refuting or challenging the suggestions already made here and many times elsewhere to try to stop thinking in English first to approach the Chinese. I am just saying that it often happens to make sense at first sight for this individual, not requiring any reasoning or analysis on my part.

In this 你这个人 construction, from my perspective, the English "you" is much more expansive than maybe some native speakers feel--expansive so as to include the 这个人. Does everyone think that all you's are equal (having equal value--pls pardon any misuse of math terms ...)? They're not, are they.  It's a little word that can be given much more space (emphasis/time/duration) than you might normally allow for a monosyllabic three-letter word, when it's carrying more weight. Like when the wife is belittling poor 老王. The 这个人 indicates her current lack of patience with/respect for him. It's almost as if she'd said, "Just look at you." I can picture her in English saying "You--" and pausing just a half-second to take in the sight of him anew, just to make sure he knows she's contemptuous. I think the moment it takes her to give him that dirty look equals the 这个人.

That's my totally amateur take on this anyway. Apologies for the bad math (and probably what is a bunch of linguistic baloney--but hey I'm only a student here)!

Posted on: Why are You Studying Chinese?

I started having flashbacks while watching The Road Home in August 2006. It was a little incident I hadn't thought about in nearly 30 years.

(describing the flashbacks turned out to be a book, and not really a remarkable story at that--so I edited myself  haha)

In any case, that made me remember something forgotten and unexpected. I was awakened to something.  I also found the sound of the language to be very 好听 hao3ting1.  At the time I planned to visit Shanghai in the fall of 2007. Though I didn't expect to become fluent in a year I did think the little learning I could do during that period would be worth it (it was).

Once I began, I found Chinese to be endlessly stimulating, a language that gives pleasure to the speaker as well. To be honest I also keep at it because it is an important language, one I would rather understand than not. Maybe most importantly, through studying Chinese I learn about and appreciate Japanese, my mother tongue, even more deeply.

Often the reason for starting to study a language is anything but compelling. My brother had a job at a Thai restaurant one summer. So many times people talked to him in Thai that he finally got a coworker to teach him how to say "I don't speak Thai. I'm Japanese." That was his first lesson. I don't know how good he is actually, but he kept it up and so does today speak, read and write.

Like Matt, and like most Japanese, I believe in 缘分 yuan2fen4.

Posted on: June Will Be CPod's Greatest Month Yet!

chanelle--maybe you need to play harder to get haha

Posted on: Regional Accents Part I

shenyajin, this is always so interesting because you ask 10 Chinese and you will probably get 10 different answers as to where the "best" is to be found. One of my teachers (唐山人) says the most beautiful putonghua she has heard was spoken in 西安, and also 哈尔滨, but she acknowledges it is not necessarily the way the entire populations there all speak. Just have to keep asking I guess, knowing there isn't really a right answer.