Excellent lesson. My wife was surprised to hear that I am apparently a monkey 猴子 (hóuzi). She was not terribly pleased with her own sign. I will suggest another trip to China once the fury has worn off.

@Echo,

你也是属虎的吗？我觉得 1986 年的老虎们很特别！另外我觉得80后的确是个很潜力的年代人。

You're also a Tiger? I think the 1986 tiger's are very special! Additionally, I think the 80's generation is a generation with a great deal of potential.

@Xiao Hu,

谢谢你，我好开心呀 :) 也替Chinese chicken们谢谢你对它们的评价。咕咕！

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

Xiao Hu, Echo, Gail and crew:

We just received an email from Andrew in Colorado containing some pretty incontrovertible evidence that chickens don't coo. I am delighted to be able to share this with you all. The name of the original file is "Actual Chicken", which pretty much says it all:

http://popupchinese.com/data/audio/actual_chicken.mp3

Thanks a lot Andrew! : )

@Xiao Hu,

哎呀，还是小虎说话公道！本来就是嘛，鸡怎么会“吧、吧”地叫呢。我觉得外国的鸡很有必要来泡泡中文学习一下普通话 :)

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

Hi Echo (and Brendan)

你好

Seems like we're all disconnected from nature!?

But what is this 'popupfix' lesson, an utterly boring version of beginners' 'what sign are you'. All the controversy and entertainment taken out.

我属豭

jiā is that right?

I'm studying a beginners' Chinese course with the Open University in UK, Edinburgh, in fact. i work for OU as well, 我是 老师

it's called 第一步

Your site is brilliant, the podcasts, the best.

Mike

@Travelyan，

LOL! The most awesome thing I've seen in a long time is, the file name, "actual_chicken.mp3" That's worthy of a spot in the internet hall of fame!

In my hometown Guangdong, people use "gok gok gok gok" to imitate chicken sounds.

谢谢 Gail,

我属亥， 'pig' 那是对吗？

Wikipedia said 'boar' so I looked that up.

圣蛋快乐 I still get some tones wrong - happy laying eggs! shēngdàn kuàilè

梦

@mikejn1 -- Hey, nice use of 亥 there. Most of the time people just say 猪 -- 亥 is really more calendrical; it tends not really to get used outside of discussions of the ancient calendrical cycle. It's good to know, though, because it shows up in a lot of characters -- like 应该的该 and 孩子的孩 -- as a sound-clue.

The 是...的 construction is kind of tricky if you're not used to it. One thing that's always helped me is thinking of 是 as an equals sign, rather than as the English verb "to be." It's pretty counterintuitive at first, but with time and practice it'll become second nature.

祝大家宽扎节快乐! (Nobody ever wishes anyone a 'Happy Kwanzaa' in Chinese; I figured I might as well be the first.)

@Xiao Hu,

我是坚持和你在一条战线的！力挺你啊！

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

@Lanzi

“闹”和“轰动”不能搭配在一起吗？是吗？我确定在词典里看过这个结构。

Hey people! Congrats for that good job you're doing here. Today I happened to find this site and I mean to use while I'm learning chinese.

Thank you!!!

Javier from Spain

this is quite amazing the webpage!somebody really does a good job, thanks to all of you behind this. your exercises, hsk list, reading material and translation, everything "under one roof". Thnks for doing this. Really helpful.

Karo.

I'm trying to learn Chinese, and I'm currently taking French... I'm finding Chinese difficult to remember because it's so different! But I love the language, and this website is the greatest! Thank you so much! :)

Also, is there a site I can find information on zodiac signs, like personalities and such?

Or can you just let me know what the Dog zodiac suggests? (personality, etc.)

Thank you again. :)

@sanjeev.sapkota,

My problems learning Chinese sound like the exact opposite of yours. When I started studying mandarin I was enrolled at the University of Toronto. We didn't have much exposure to the spoken language, but what we could do was pour over texts and so that is what we did. It wasn't a very effective way of learning to speak, but it definitely taught us how to read and write.

Lessons learned? Writing is actually pretty easy once you internalize the basic rules governing stroke order. If you're not clear about those, we've put together a lesson series with our Chinese writing pad that covers how to write Chinese characters. If you have an iPhone, we've also got a free Chinese iPhone app that does basically the same thing, and includes a lot of characters you can practice on. Once you know the basic rules it becomes trivial to learn new characters. The challenge is less actually drawing the strokes and more remembering exactly which components are found in the less frequent characters.

I use pinyin-based input methods much more than writing by hand these days and definitely find myself getting stuck trying to remember exactly how to write less frequent characters. The issue is that recognizing a character from a list is a different cognitive challenge that remembering how to write it without any reference. That said, there are fewer and fewer situations where you will need to write by hand, and even Chinese people have these problems. Cellphones with pinyin-based IMEs also make for a pretty handy reference guides on the odd occasion you'll forget.

So... I'd suggest learning the basic rules for how to write characters and practicing when you get the chance. As long as you're using Chinese every day you'll keep getting better at it.

Good luck!

--david

@chad,

I think we can also all agree that the "Western chicken" is the objectively correct one. Except for Echo. :)

--dave

Xiao Hu, 你没养过一只猫呢？所有的动物们都非常好了解。bok bok 的意思应该是说 "给饭，给饭，快一点儿给饭！"

Totally, the Chinese chicken is whacked. But I know of a few western anglo animal sounds that are just as dumb.

oink oink? wtf? that sounds NOTHING like a pig.

many others...

@Xiao Hu,

Well, woof woof and quack quack are not TOO bad. I'd say "neigh" for a horse is about as off as it gets, but then again, how do you spell the sounds that a horse makes? Inevitably, most languages will fail trying to copy the phonetic of an animal's call...

@kay_kay1424,

说属鸡就好了，咱们这儿的属相不分公鸡母鸡的～^^

--Amber

amber@popupchinese.com

So I'm a tiger, my fiance is a pig... And he's Chinese so his family take this quite seriously. So the question is, is our marriage doomed?!

@xiaozhu

Just have some grand kids and they'll stop worrying so much :). Nothing makes parents happier than grand kids hahaha.

Craig

@xiaozhu,

Great! No problem now! Wedding ceremony can be exhausted, fighting!

--Amber

amber@popupchinese.com

Echo, I noticed that Wikipedia lists Chicken also as "Phoenix". Well, I am Chicken but would rather say I'm Phoenix, especially since I live in Phoenix, AZ!

Can you fill me in?