User Comments - zhenlijiang

Posted on: Tea Tasting

Mmm Dan that might further confuse XiaoLiang and his question still isn't answered. 哪种好喝？ is the line from this dialogue that sparked his question, as you see if you go back and read from the first comment in this subthread. And as part of my unfortunately less-than-excellent attempts to answer, I was saying that 哪 is "which", as opposed to "what". And that 哪种 and 怎样（什么样）的 shouldn't be confused because they're completely different.

We know you're being helpful, and do appreciate that.

Posted on: Tea Tasting

Oh right. I'm very sorry (looking at my dictionary now), it looks like I've lied to you.

Apologies for confusing anybody who read my comment above.

Even though I was wrong about 怎样, I think what I said about the difference with that and 哪种 stands. Those are two different kinds of "kinds". 哪 is "which". Hope that helps ...

Posted on: Tea Tasting

Actually 哪种好喝？ is "Which kind (of tea) is good?".

But you're thinking of "what kind of", right? That would be 什么样的. 你想找什么样的伴侣 / 对象？ What kind of (life) partner are you looking for? (in English we're maybe more likely to put the question as: "What qualities do you seek in a partner?")

怎样 is "in what way = how".

Your question also seems to me to be about a distinction in English. "Which (what) kind is good?". But this kind (jasmine, oolong, longjing etc.) isn't the same kind as in "What kind/sort of X do you have in mind?"--where someone is being asked to describe, or list certain qualities and attributes they have in mind about something.

Posted on: Tea Tasting

Thanks XiaoLiang for preventing this from being a conversation with and between me and myself only.

It seems super cars are 超级跑车 (超级跑车 are "super cars").

Posted on: Smelly Cheese

Oh haha. Yeah thank goodness for menus with pictures.

I've mentioned this before, but often Japanese pronunciations of characters will be close to Cantonese. Japanese like myself who know zero Cantonese will go to HK and see "的士" written on the cabs and immediately recognize the word "taxi", because we can read those characters as teki-shi. I guess to someone who has only learned how to read hanzi in Mandarin the association is much more of a leap, if it can be made at all. I tried to explain once, but couldn't make my teacher from Qingdao see the point (she had learned to read characters as Japanese kanji too, so you would think she would get it ...).

Posted on: Smelly Cheese

Thanks everybody for all the live input straight from China. Great supplement to the lesson.

奶酪, 干酪 and 乳酪 (more frequently the first two) I'm seeing in things people have written--translated from other languages maybe--and published on the Internet, about French and Italian cheeses.

So I think I'm taking away from all this--cheese is still in the process of becoming part of people's lives in China, so we'll see in a few years, what it ends up getting called most widely?

Posted on: Smelly Cheese

"法兰西多式"? "菠萝班戟"?

??

Posted on: Smelly Cheese

So is 奶酪 nǎilào the most common term for cheese? My (Japanese-Chinese) dictionary tells me it's
1) a type of yoghurt;  2) cheese. The same dictionary says
干酪 gānlào is cheese, and
乳酪 rǔlào is 1) a yoghurt-type lactic acid drink;  2) cheese.
How frequently are these other two terms seen and understood as "cheese"?

Posted on: Smelly Cheese

Thank you for volunteering your time and trouble to report the issue to tech support on our behalf, then telling us you did so XiaoLiang. The message here is duly noted ...

Would a disorder such as this one really fail to be noted by CPod within (regular workday) 24 hrs, if users did not report it? I just have to wonder this aloud.

Posted on: Fans at Andy Lau's Concert

I love 无间道 as well. I totally forgive it for being so ... unoriginal, because they made it entertaining. And most of all because of my favorite, 伟仔 (way cuter! hahaha). Enjoyed watching 曾志伟 too.

Yes the third film was weak. I only discovered just how weak when I got the DVD and saw all those awful scenes (the library scenes, the so obvious nightclub scene they gave the 黎明 character, just to mention a couple) that they had cut out of the version I had seen--one cut down to just 90 tight minutes for broadcast on Japanese TV. That was good. Thank goodness I'd recorded that and didn't erase the copy I kept after deleting all the ads.

As for "not as fond of his music as I am of his acting"--我同意. You wonder why they went through with having Andy and Tony duet on that 无间道 theme song (it is so Hong Kong though).