Consider this thread open. Feel free to break a leg, go bananas, etc.
Ken Carroll
Monday afternoon open thread
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
This is the slowest day I can remember for site activity. Very few lesson comments, and a few blog comments. The open thread hase been sittign here and been ignored for 6 hours! Is it because of 911? Am I missing something here?
Ken Carroll
I’m not going to go bananas, but I do have a question – are you all celebrating the Autumn Moon Festival? Is it a big deal? We just attended the Moon Festival yesterday and there’s another one in Chinatown on the 23rd but I don’t have a sense as to the importance to Chinese culture – is this an American touristy phenomenon? Are you eating mooncakes? Does it really hold the same importance as Thanksgiving in the US?
As usual I want this http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/search.html
but better!
I want it it be able to extract sound snippets from the Cpod archive of Chinesy audio.
wo xiang
wo xiangyao
wo yao
wo xuyao
and every other xiangy yoay xuy combination
Before you ask the colour is blue
(that is the colour of the stick I want the moon on also).
I would like to be able to use the C-Pod glossary with more confidence. At this moment I am building a set of flash cards. It is my understanding that the word zāng means “dirty” as in “dirty clothes”. However, the C-Pod glossary defines zāng as “viscera”. I don’t know where the definitions came from but I have run into this sort of thing fairly regularly. Perhaps there is a set of definitions that could be adopted that are more in tune with regular common everyday usage. I imagine it would be an enormous task to edit the present glossary as there are over 13,000 entries. I am not complaining but rather I am making a constructive comment for consideration regarding future improvements. Nǐ tīng wǒ de shēngyin hǎo bù hǎo?
Ken, do you try to follow the discussions on the lessons as they develop? Matthew, Andrew, and I had an interesting (at least, to me) back-and-forth re: “What Character Is This?” and the pitfalls of Chinese etymology. I was hoping you or Jenny would weigh-in on the subject since you started it!!
In my particular case, this has been a very busy day for me. My kids started school and new season routine start.
Joe,
I do indeed follow all the discussions on the site, but it can be difficult to just jump in on some of them. That particular thread required the kind of time and deliberation that I just didnt ahve at the time. (I also didn’t understand half of Mathew’s vocabulary!) I see my role here as a facilitator, so sometimes it is better to stay in the background a bit. In that case I am more than happy to see you drive the discussion amongst yourselves, the learners.
Ken Carroll
I think 3 things may have contributed to the slowdown yesterday, at least from the american podders: the end of the first week of school for kids in the states, the annual end-of-summer/early autumn rush to go outside and enjoy the weather while it’s still pretty nice; and the start of the american NFL football season
9-11 is really a big thing over here today, of course. 5 years allready – wow
Probably slow because school has started, and not just for kids. Doesn’t the poll on the home page show most of us take regular lessions besides Chinese Pod? I know I am swamped with vocab, hanzi, family and work.
Hey Ken,
Whatever happened to the photoshop contest?
Ma ding, I think you’re right.
Panda, let me check out where we stand twit the competition. I know that Bazza has done agreat collageof learners photos on the forums – I’ll link to that later.
Ken Carroll
I think we as a so-called community are surprisingly poor at answering legitimate questions put by others. Take the guy above, who asked straightforward questions about a Chinese festival. I bet he never gets an answer. I’d love to answer his question, but I too find the Chinese festivals an enigma, beyond my level of understanding. There are lots of instances where people ask legimate questions but the community ignores them and the small-talk just flows on and on and on. On the weekend just gone, I asked a simple question on the “Saturday Show” about Xiangyang Lu (it went unanswered so I found out myself). I won’t be asking any more questions.
We are, or should be, a community of like-minded people. We can do better than this. We need some sort of informal code-of-conduct whereby there’s an understanding that someone/anyone (not Ken or CPod) will answer legimate questions if they happen to know the answer. I mean, are we a community or not?
Bob,
That’s a serious issue. If you send us in the ones you discover, they can get corrected faster and at least you’ll have better definitions in your personal vocab list. Don’t worry, though, a better glossary is definitely one of our goals.
John
Ken,
If Lilli writes me a love letter I want to be able to read it. Is that a good enough reason to study Chinese?
Mike in Jubei
Two negatives in a row…
You have a great thing going here at Chinesepod, I really like the idea. I signed up for a demo a few months ago and now I am a premium member. If you guys can get the site fixed it would be great. I am using the glossary to add words to my bank and then using the bank tools for memorization and pronunciation. Unfortunately I am getting Mysql errors on the glossary,
I wanted to post the issue on the forum but you have to be manually activated by an admin. I am not sure I have seen other forums require that and it is not very friendly. Also note that there is another complaint of the Mysql error in the forum. Unfortunately I could not log in to confirm that I am also having a problem.
I looked around and I see you have one general Gmail contact. Why not use Gmail domains and get a Chinesepod email address. Give tech support their own so we can contact support directly. The service is in beta but the turnaround is immediate.
So far a little frustrated but I really like the personalities in the Ipods so this is not going to scare me away. Keep up the hard work and fix the site!
Oh, by the way, I have been talking to support about the problem, so no reason to bring this up to anyone. Just giving my feedback on the service.
Okay John. I will make a note of the ones I find and send them to you via gmail. I just came accross another one. The word 衫 shān for garment or gown as in 衬衫 chènshān (shirt or blouse) is not in the glossary. It is not that uncommon a word to be left out of a list of 13,000 plus words. This is not a life or death matter either. It’s just an annoyance. Something to make better in the future.
Ooooops! John, I just noticed something. If I enter the Pinyin word “shan” in the glossary the charater for “gown” doesn’t appear on the list of charaters but if I enter the English word “shirt” it appears with 衬chèn as 衬衫 chènshān. How curious is THAT? Seems like someone is trying to trick this old newbie