In this podcast we'll teach you a respectful form of address you can use to refer cab drivers, serving staff and martial arts instructors. We'll also teach you left from right, and share some tips on how to make the best use of your newest language partner (the cab driver). And as icing on the cake, Brendan and Anthony share some of their taxi stories from the wilds of Zhengzhou and Harbin, known collectively in these parts as "the interior".
 said on
June 24, 2009
大家好

Just thought I'd let you know,

iTunes is giving me a "Authorisation is needed" error when I try download the Podcast.

祝好

伊恩
 said on
June 24, 2009
ians - that's truly bizarre. I'll check it out and see if I have the same issue.
 said on
June 26, 2009
trevelyan - Did you find out anything? I even can't download it direct on my iPhone

伊恩
 said on
June 27, 2009
现在 it's ok, I got it

伊恩
 said on
June 27, 2009
Hey Ians,

Was just looking at it now. There seemed to have been a problem auto-uploading the file to our CDN, so we were streaming the file from our servers instead.

The RSS feed is set to grab the file directly from the CDN, so that would explain the problem. The file wasn't where the RSS feed say it would be. Republishing fixed it. I'll add the same conditionality to our RSS code to try and avoid this in the future too. :)

Sorry for the delay and hope everything is cool. Loved the photos btw, especially the motorcycle ones!

Cheers,

--dave
 said on
June 28, 2009
Hey Dave

真的没问题 about the file.

Everything is almost cool, the company where I worked went down the pan yesterday after 20 years, but it seems there will be a phoenix out of the ashes and we will start again soon.

Don't know of any video editing DVD authoring jobs going in 北京 do you?

Glad you liked the pics, not quite fitting in the style of your site but your welcome to use them if you want, I'll send some more later from typical Swiss locations.

祝好

Ian
 said on
June 28, 2009
@Ian - glad it's working again and sorry to hear about the job. I don't know anything about the DVD authoring scene or how it's handled here, so wouldn't be much if any help. It sounds as if the economy isn't as bad here as it is back home, although the wage scale is not what you can make out west. If we hear of anything we'll let you know.

祝好,

--dave
 said on
July 13, 2009
@ Dave, Just thought I'd let you know everything is fine on the job front now, they managed to find some investors, so everything is business as usual :o)

祝好,

Ian
 said on
July 13, 2009
@ians - glad to hear it, even if it means we won't see you in Beijing again anytime soon.... :(
 said on
February 27, 2010
Hi Echo,

I am the subscriber to "Pop up Chinese" and I have problems with chinese characters. It is OK when I work on my lap top - they're there (probably they must have gotten installed somehow when I was in China, having it with me) but I don't have them on my PC. Please help.

Piotr from Poland
 said on
February 27, 2010
Hi Piotr,

Most of the time this sort of problem is caused by the Operating System lacking the necessary fonts to display Chinese glyphs. Here is a quick guide to downloading/installing the necessary fonts in XP:

http://newton.uor.edu/Departments&Programs/AsianStudiesDept/Language/asianlanguageinstallation_XP.html

What operating system are you using?

Best,

--david

 said on
August 1, 2011
Hello everyone. I'm not really good with listening the dialogue (I actually enjoy more Echo's voice spealing slowly) and i couldn't get the first verb during the dialogue for 'turn left'... was it 'wan1 zuo3'?? I think I might see a doctor cause I really think I'm getting deaf!!
 said on
August 1, 2011
@silvamartinsfellipe,

Very close. It's 往左 (wang3 zuo3). 往 (wang3) meaning "towards" and 左 (zuo3) meaning left. Usually you'd just say 左 (zuo3) or 右 (you4) when giving directions, but they use 往 here because the direction is followed by a verb, in this case 打 (da3) for turning.

Best,

--david

 said on
August 1, 2011
David, thanks for the reply. And to tell you the truth I'm quite impressed as 你非常快了... (i posted that not even 5 minutes ago!) do you guys stay online all day long answering these messages??

thanks again for the response.

真的谢谢你

Hm... by the way, was it all correct, I mean, with the hanzi? And this 打 (da3) is it the same da3 for 'da dianhua'?
 said on
August 1, 2011
@silvamartinsfellipe,

Yes, it's the same 打, and it also should be "你非常快", no 了, because we don't use 了 with adjectives :)

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
August 1, 2011
And... we're not actually online ALL the time. Just back from a weekend spent more or less completely offline, so we're catching up on things. We do keep odd hours though. :)
 said on
August 1, 2011
@echo, @david, @Absolute Beginners,

You're awsome! I know you read this all the time, but anyway, you are really awsome. Thanks for the help.

@echo, don't we use 了 with adjectives? Uh, sorry, I thoght we did...

Thank you all

Fellipe
 said on
August 2, 2011
Fellipe,

A more precise explanation is that you can't put adjectives into the past aspect using 了. But you CAN still use 了 to signify change of state, as with 天黑了 (it's night), 好了 (things are good now), etc.

I disagree with Echo's answer but I understand it -- she's thinking that whenever you add 了 to an adjective you are treating it like a verb. This is not wrong, but it's not entirely accurate since there are many things Chinese verbs can do that Chinese adjectives cannot. You can't follow adjectives by most verb complements or reduplicate them in the same way as verbs. So while adjectives sometimes behave like verbs, they aren't really verbs.

We don't usually go into this sort of detail at the Absolute Beginner level since discussing grammar on this level is usually counterproductive: the verb/adjective distinction captures about 95% of what people need to know and most people learning Chinese never find out there are these faultlines in their understanding of Chinese grammar. The basic reason for much of the confusion is that 20th century Chinese linguists who developed formal grammatical models for the Chinese language were importing concepts from western linguistics and often adopted western terms like verbs, adjectives and prepositions which only loosely captured the way Chinese works (i.e. prepositions are actually verbs too). So it gets more confusing the more you know.

We try to err on the side of making stuff intuitive at the Absolute Beginner level, but do go into some of these problems at the intermediate level where we start tearing down some of the oversimplifications that are useful when starting out and start using words like coverbs to describe things like prepositions, etc.

Best,

--david
 said on
August 2, 2011
@trevelyan,

Hahaha, thanks, that's exactly what I wanted to say :P

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com