ians - that's truly bizarre. I'll check it out and see if I have the same issue.

现在 it's ok, I got it

伊恩

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

@ 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

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

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!!

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'?

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. :)

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