It is the sound of hunger, guttural and primal and expressed in its rawest form. And more often than not we hear it from none other than Apple, and right in the middle of a recording session. "I'm on a diet," she announces apologetically after the aftershocks subside. "You look fine," we reply. And she smiles and we continue.Occasionally, Echo force feeds her chicken to make it go away. This lesson covers everything up to the force-feeding stage. If you have to do that in mandarin, you're on your own.
veritas21
said on December 8, 2008
Will people understand us if we just string random sounds together and add 叫 at the end (say, "鼓鼓鼓鼓叫"?) or are there only certain combinations that work and we just have to memorize them?
Echo
said on December 8, 2008
@veritas21,
Hi,it's a very good question. There are certain combinations, and people don't even always put 叫 afterwards.
Here are some examples:
hungry: “咕咕gu1gu1”叫、“咕噜咕噜gu1lu1gu1lu1”叫（we put 叫 here since the subject is 肚子）
sound of crying: "呜呜wu1wu1”、“哇哇wa1wa1”地哭了
sound of sleeping: “呼呼hu1hu1”大睡
dog barking: “汪汪wang1wang1”叫
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
veritas21
said on December 8, 2008
thanks Echo, I'll stick to the combinations then.
brett
said on December 9, 2008
Some parts of this language are so easy, and others are so foreign for me. It's always the small things like describing sounds that really trip me up and leave me gesturing like a 5 year old.I like the idea of repeating myself three times to make the point. At the very least, that should be useful for buying a bit of time to figure out what to say next.
jon
said on December 10, 2008
Hehe, when I read "Echo force feeds her chicken to make it go away" I had visions of animal cruelty, with Echo's poor pet chicken being forced to eat corn meal...
Echo
said on December 10, 2008
@jon,
冤枉...
哇哇哇...
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
nadasax
said on May 14, 2009
the guy in this recording speaks too fast and unclearly for it to be useful in learning how to understand/pronounce chinese... espcially the phrase 我肚子从来没加过。its not even close...i've listen to it at half-speed and its a complete mish-mash which may be understandable to the native ear but isn't even CLOSE to a decipherable pronunciation "woherdetuzhunnameijiawa" is exactly what he actually says which i assume is suppsed to be 我儿的肚子“从来”（pronounced really REALLY loosely）没加(the only clear part)过(again,spoken VERY loosely). I like what seems to be your philosophy of presenting authentic speech, but it needs to be tempered with the pragmatic needs of foreign chinese students in the early phase of just getting to know the language...if a chinese mother spoke to her infant at full speed like it was an adult it wouldn't learn...you have to speak to the appropriate level of the listener... being challenged is great, but there needs to be a realistic limit to how every-day and native the speech is, we learn to crawl-walk-run, not jump right into full sprints... love the site, appreciate all the hard work...feel that the absolute begginer and elementry lessons should be very clear both for comprehension's sake and also as a good model for learning pronunciation... we're students after all ;)
doubt616
said on May 14, 2009
@nadasax - 加油！
On a related topic; I had no idea what Echo was talking about half the time. All I could do was listen to Brendan's responses and try to figure out what Echo might have been saying from that. It isn't that the dialogue is difficult, but that some of the explanations and thoughts on the dialogue are being given in full-speed Mandarin.
@echo - 你说中文的时候，你可以说慢一点儿吗？Pretty please?
Your Mandarin is an absolute pleasure to listen to but the speed of your speech here seems better suited to an Intermediate lesson rather than an Elementary one.
Elementary
said on May 14, 2009
@doubt616 & nadasax,
好的，我会注意的 :)
Thanks for your advices. They are very helpful since they tell us what our users thoughts about the site. We will think about them carefully and try to make more improvement in the future.
It is 我的肚子从来没“叫”过, btw.
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
nadasax
said on May 14, 2009
@echo
to let you know, the PDF transcript has 我肚子从来没加过 without the 的...
Echo
said on May 14, 2009
@nadasax,Typed wrong, sorry. Without 的.Again, it is "叫", but not "加" ...我肚子从来没“叫”过。--Echoecho@popupchinese.com
Brendan
said on May 14, 2009
@nadasax & doubt616 -- Thanks for the feedback. I agree that we probably need to be doing a better job of drawing clear distinctions between the levels -- the speech in this dialogue is certainly authentic, but at the Elementary level, that might not be the best thing.
daniel6874
said on February 9, 2015
Totally disagree with the criticism here. The language is what it is. Just because an expression is elementary doesn't mean it's not going to be spoken in a normal way. It's nice to hear it taken apart and explained but slowing the tempo would not be helpful, since that's not what one would hear normally. If the object is to understand everyday utterances, these podcasts are exactly right IMO. Thanks for these.
s01hbot1
said on March 18, 2016
I quoted this podcast to explain the following quote from John Dewey to a member of Lang-8 who's learning English. I wrote that 还能 in this podcast functions like "as if" in the quotation below: Consequently, philosophical discussion is likely to be a dressing out of antithetical traditions, where criticism of one view is thought to afford proof of the truth of its opposite (as if formulation of views guaranteed logical exclusives).What do you think? Thank you as ever, endlessly wonderful and entertaining Popup Chinese!
lauracdaniell
said on August 31, 2016
I am afraid I agree with nadasax in that, at the elementary level, this is just too fast on the review. Is there a way to slow down the dialog for us truly elementary learners? I have learned German, french, and Russian, and doubt I could have done so with without slow proper pronunciation early on.Controlled scientific studies of learning a foreign language show that people learn best when they hear the new language pronounced (badly) by their own native speakers in the beginning! Not an intuitive idea but worth exploring! Sort of like listening to Eleanor Beardsley on NPR (BTW, she is not just doing french coverage now but also Italian news!).
lauracdaniell
said on August 31, 2016
In case, I didn't word that right--I meant that learning, say Chinese, by Americans, is facilitated by hearing other Americans pronounce Chinese badly.
