User Comments - zhenlijiang

Posted on: An Introduction to Chengyu

This lesson (it ought to appear as a Related Lesson ...) gives a pretty good answer.

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/what-is-a-chengyu

Posted on: Pricey Beer

Thank you so much for all the replies Jiaojie!

Sorry I didn't make myself clear but I still think "still" has been incorrectly applied for the 还是 in 进口车太贵了，你还是买国产车吧。 "so you still ought to buy a domestic one" doesn't really work. This 还是 (meaning "after consideration, after all") is hard to translate, often in English we can't have a corresponding word and shouldn't force it that way. Anyhow it isn't "still".

Posted on: Pricey Beer

Three-year-old lesson! The idea of 促销 in bars is unexpected to me, interesting. But I suppose Happy Hour could be considered a kind of 促销. Is this something that has caught on in China?

All my (many) other questions are from the Expansion sentences:

《瓶装》
袋装的牛奶  --This is milk you buy and take away in plastic bags?

喝瓶装水不环保。 --Just want to make sure I'm understanding the thinking behind this sentence:  Bottled water is un-ecological because resources are wasted, emissions are released in manufacture and transport, and more garbage is produced. Is this right?

《酒单》
这种酒的实际价格怎么比酒单上的价格要高？
I don't really get this. What is the situation here? Is this something that can happen quite often?

《进口》
你想吃进口水果吗？
What kinds of fruit could this be, for instance? "Imported fruit" is kind of hard to grasp for me, perhaps because we have way fewer kinds of domestic tropical fruits in Japan than in China and so eat imported fruit all the time as a matter of fact. Is it special to have imported fruit?

进口车太贵了，你还是买国产车吧。
Import cars are too expensive, so you still ought to buy a domestic one.
还是 is translated incorrectly as "still (ought to)".

《促销》
听说哪家商场明天有促销活动，你去吗？
I heard that that shopping center was going to have a sales promotion tomorrow. Are you going?
Is it just plain wrong to think of this 你去吗？ as "Wanna go?"

《喝不了》
这些水你喝得了吗？　　Can you drink all of this water?
Whoa. I had the impression 些 was applicable only for things you could count, never thought 水 could take it! 

《抢钱》
这件衣服最多五十块，你们居然要卖我五百块，真是抢钱。
Also new to me--didn't know we could say 卖我 for "sell (to) me", with no preposition linking the 卖 and the 我.

Posted on: A Short Haircut

Bald on women doesn't really work that way unfortunately.

Think you need to start a post for your project! Foohardy journeys many poddies will be able to relate to.

Posted on: 春节采访

I also had an idea early in the now 800+ comment-long Lesson Topic Suggestions thread, for you guys to be interviewed for our benefit:

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/5240#comment-123690

(I still think this is a great idea, but it might be such a hit if you did it that anything after that will become anticlimactic ... ? so you'll never do it ...)

Interviews, esp personal ones, would be great material on an aspect of spoken self-expression we can't learn through the dialogues, great as they are. We can't learn it from reading blogs either. We get a little of it in the banter (I think Jenny "gives" more than the other hosts, but that could be because she's so fully expressive and most comfortable in both languages); I'd really like more.

Hope this can be done!

Posted on: A Short Haircut

At our age (not that I'm your age) what matters is that we do have enough hair on top for the barber to ask where to part it, right? Or to ask for a flattop.

I have said before, your real-life interactions with people in China would be such interesting dialogues for us. So when do you think you might share?

Posted on: 春节采访

我很喜欢这种“交流”方式。 to answer Jenny's 3+year-old question.
Are there any other lessons done in this format besides the Upper Inter Experiencing Agricultural Life? Don't know if you didn't get enough positive feedback then (I can see here you didn't get much at all), but I would very much like to hear more of these.

Your dialogues are great, sometimes incredibly great, well-written and brought to life by wonderful actors; of course I enjoy them too. But once in a while it would be such a treat to listen to native speakers just being their natural selves, esp if they're the people behind CPod. Please consider!

Posted on: A Short Haircut

Hi Bodawei, as far as I can see this poster(?) is indicating what these military haircuts ought to look like objectively--"front view", "side view/profile" and "rear view".

I didn't know there is a wet wash option in China. We don't have the dry wash, over here we think of it as "Chinese-style shampoo". Along with foot massage, 中国式 shampoo is one of those things we Japanese tourists really like to go do. It's a casual excursion for a taste of local life, it should be low-risk (suxiaoya's story notwithstanding), should only set us back 20kuai, 30 at most. That's what I was doing in that story I linked to.

Some of us might also like to go out for a shampoo sometimes rather than spend longer than usual rinsing out our hair in a hotel or apartment with a weaker shower than we're accustomed to.

Posted on: A Short Haircut

我在这个帖子里所说的师傅，那位是剪平头的。 The 师傅 I told about in this comment--it's on the second (newer) page--had a 平头.

跟赶时髦的帅哥不一样！

说到男人的流行发型，我觉得这个广告口号挺有意思的（是普遍知道的吗？）：

有发没型　怎么行 （我很型！）

"To have hair and no style, how can that be cool?"

Guess 平头 isn't considered a hairstyle, at least not by this maker of stuff for men's hair.

Posted on: A Short Haircut

Right of course. My reference above to users of pressure sales tactics (and hairdressers with bad hair) is general, and applies all over the world.

That's why it's good too, to name names (I realize you don't want to do that here). Word on my favorite travel site from fellow travelers who've actually been to a hair salon or spa or stayed at a hotel I'm considering is the most reliable guide. And so often you can make a place change its bad service or practices for the better, by telling about your experience there like it was (reputation does matter to them). Or if they don't care enough to change, you may run them out of business ...