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This week is moving week at Popup Towers, and so we actually bought this toilet cleaning product after we saw the state of the washroom in our new apartment. After about an hour putting its claims to test, we can confirm that Mr. Muscle leaves a somewhat pleasing antiseptic smell in your washroom, although if you don't rinse well it can translate into nasal irritation. They really don't mess around with their chemicals.
 said on
June 8, 2013
Hi, I am really glad you have this new feature on your site, but it is a bit frustrating that I am still unable to view most of them (including this one) here in Canada on my iMac, and not any of them on the iPad. Safari 5.1.9 / iOS 5.1.1
 said on
June 10, 2013
Hi, here in Germany I cannot view it from Youtube too, however from Youku it works fine. Unfortunately it's still way too fast for me.
 said on
June 10, 2013
this is great. I've been away from China for 5 years (and when there I didn't watch TV); hadn't realised they were creating such inventive adverts.

Can you explain the use of "hold" here?

Also, FYI the Adsotrans translates 内壁 as "intine". My Pleco, using the same dictionary I guess, says same. It seems that intine is indeed a real word (though either obscure or specialist vocab for biology) meaning something like "cell wall", but in this case means the inner bowl of the toilet...
 said on
June 11, 2013
@jaynewman.china,

When you say "hold", do you mean the video would stop when you put your mouse on the transcript? The video stops so that you can move your mouse onto the Chinese sentences, then you'll see the popups of each word.

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
June 12, 2013
@Echo,

I think jaynewman.china is referring to the "hold" in “hold住”. This article (in Mandarin) explains a bit--it means something like "press on" or "persevere", something you might say to remind yourself to put in more effort.

In the context of this, I think it just means "effort" (省时省力,hold住 = saves time and effort).
 said on
June 12, 2013
Just to chip in, we actually have an intermediate lesson that covers a number of these kinds of english expressions where words have been wholesale appropriated by mandarin speakers, but the meaning has changed somewhat:

http://popupchinese.com/lessons/intermediate/the-gods-of-powerpoint

Best

--david

 said on
June 12, 2013
Thanks, all. Yes, this is the meaning I had in mind.

kd.p.ofori: I think you may have included a link on your post that didn't make it into the forum. Can you post that again?

David: thanks for the tip. I'll review that one.

When I lived in Taiwan in the late 80s/early 90s, it was common to use English expressions in Chinese, but almost always (as far as I remember) the meaning was obvious to an English speaker. eg, discussing a product in Chinese and using the English chemical name mid-sentence.
 said on
June 12, 2013
@jaynewman.china:

No problem. Here's the link:

http://www.sdx123.com/yule/qita/2567.html
 said on
June 15, 2013
Is anyone else having the same problem as I am? The videos do not play, the transcript does not show up AND I cannot mark the videos as "unstudied" to get them off of my "studied" podcast list. I am using Safari with Java enabled from the U.S. I used to be able to watch the videos and all of the features worked fine.
 said on
June 15, 2013
@ddvandam,

I'm having the same problem with Safari but not with Firefox. Not sure what the problem is, but I'll take a closer look and try to get it fixed tonight. Sorry for the trouble.

--david
 said on
June 19, 2013
@ddvandam,

Ok.... I think the issues are fixed with Chrome. Seems to have been an error getting thrown by some updates that were causing the entire thing to crash. Sorry for the trouble, and thanks for bringing it to my attention.

--david

 said on
June 20, 2013
@david

Thanks for looking into it. I don't have Chrome, however, I do run Safari as previously mentioned. As of today I am still unable to access any of the videos and accompanying interactive content.
 said on
June 20, 2013
Forgot to mention, it still does that really obnoxious thing where it will not allow me to mark it as "unstudied" to get it off my list if I visit the page of a video. I try to mark "unstudied" in my podcast list and it just pops back on. This forces me to clear my subscriptions and manually add all of my actually studied podcasts back onto my "studied" list. Hopefully there's a fix for this. Thanks!
Mark Lesson Studied