You’ve come to this blog for news, community, information, pedagogy, and entertainment from Ken and the rest of us at ChinesePod. But what about the other side? What about following along with another ChinesePod student, someone who feels the pain of saying the wrong tone (A misplaced fourth tone and “Can I ask you’ becomes ‘Can I kiss you?’) or shares the joys of successfully asking where the bathroom is in a Chinese Restaurant?
Starting today, we have a new member of the ChinesePod blog family. Frank Fradella is a ChinesePod user who also happens to be a professional author, blogger, and, in his own words:
“Hi! I’m Frank Fradella and, like you, I came here to get my brain around Mandarin. Unfortunately, my brain ain’t what it used to be! When I’m not on this site trying to cram new vocab into my skull with a shoehorn, two crowbars, and a stick of butter, I make my living as a writer and artist. I’m far from being a linguistic savant and much of what you’ll hear from me is likely to be commiseration and personal triumphs as I try to make these four tones sing in my very American mouth, and with any luck, you’ll learn a little extra something here.”
Frank will be writing the ChinesePod Blog: Mandarin Mutterings with Frank Fradella. He’s hilarious and it’s another great place for learners of all levels (Frank is a Newbie/ ‘Ele’) to communicate. Check out Frank’s blog, here.
-Colleen
Hi Frank-
I had a questions a few lessons ago concerning gender:
The subject of gender with identification is something I’ve struggled with. When I referred to a person once as nu3ren2, I was told that is to be avoided as potentially inappropriate. Trying to figure out what would be appropriate, my tutor told me to think outside English a little, where gender is stated with just about every reference. Gender is not as important to designate in many references?
I have written just a few questions on lessons have not had them answered except by Aric on the Saturday show. It is clear to me that CPOD caters to a very talented, relatively small group of intellectuals who really drill down on issues with many entries.
Perhaps this would be a better venue for me? Hope so.
Thanks,
Ron
The link to franks blog does not appear to be correct (I get a page not found error :().
Hey there, Ron! I find the gender issue pretty interesting. I’m a Newbie, so I won’t have the answers to many of the questions you’ll ask (especially one like that, which seems cultural as opposed to strictly linguistic). However, I studied Spanish for a while (Yo estudie Español en la escuela secondaria para cinco años), and you couldn’t wipe your nose without having to consider the gender of your handkerchief! It’s actually something of a relief to me that there aren’t such strict guidelines in Mandarin. Or… to be more precise… if such guidelines exist, I haven’t met them yet!
And Chris, I can’t honestly tell you what happened there. It was working fine last night. Maybe I’ve been given the hook already!
In all likelihood, it’s just a technical glitch. Check back later! You don’t want to miss the kung fu chicken!
Hi there. Actually it’s not a technical hitch, but a communication hitch. We planned to host Frank at blogs.chinesepod.com/newbie, but somewhere along the way the blog ended up located at blogs.chinesepod.com/frank. I think it’s better to call it newbie, as the focus of the discussion will be newbie issues and Frank’s experiences as a relative beginner, so we moved it a few minutes ago. I’ve corrected the link in Colleen’s post, and so Frank can now be found at here.
Check it out - it’s good stuff
To answer Ron’s question, as best I can. I’m not sure I quite understand but here goes.
I think what they meant wasnt that gender isnt appropriate in titles as that is the incorrect way of addressing a woman. If a lady was about to be hit by a bus you wouldnt yell “女人!小心!” you would yell “小姐! 小心!”. It is more appropraite to use 小姐 instead of 女人 when addressing someone. With men you would use 先生 instead of 男人. People wont be offended if you use 男人 or 女人 when addressing them, probably just laugh at you.
Another thing you do in both Chinese and Korean culture, you address people by what relation they would be in your family. Like calling an old man “Grandpa” is normal in China and Korea and a woman your mom’s age “auntie” even if you have never seen them before is not unheard of. In fact, 小姐 is literally “sister”.
Frank’s blog is called newbie because it has a newbie role, great!
So, when Frank is no longer a newbie do we
A) change the URL again?
B) close him down and boot him out?
I don’t like either of those options! Is there such a thing as perpetual newbieism? If so, I might have found a respectable classification for myself, too.
By the way, once at his blog, the links to the comments don’t work because they’re still pointing to frank instead of newbie. If your web browser hasn’t been dumbed down, then once you get the 404 not found message, simply change “frank” to “newbie” in the URL and all will be revealed.
Frank is an entertaining writer, and has never been afraid to expose himself when it makes for a good story. This blog might become my first stop on the site, and it’s already the only page that has two bookmarks.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that 女士 (nǔ shì) is a respectful way to refer to a woman, especially in professional settings. But I don’t know if it is used where you might use 女人.
OK, this is weird. How many other hidden blogs are there on this site? Frank’s blog has a URL, kindly provided in this entry, but there seems to be no list of what other blogs may be mysteriously lurking underneath blogs.chinesepod.com. Is Frank’s the only one?
Hi Greg,
We also have blogs written in Japanese, Korean and German! You can find their links on the blog homepage (on the bottom right hand side).:D Frank’s the first Cpodder to be part of the ChinesePod blog but he is definitely not the last! ;D
-Eileen
You mean… I’m going to have competition? I’d better step up the show a bit!
Bring on the dancing girls!
BLOG in CHINESE - It keeps striking me as really weird to see the list of Cblogs in English, Japanese, German, Korean, Spanish…but no Chinese. Maybe the twist could be that there’s a new Chinese blog that’s not attached to the .zh part of the website.
Somewhere where everyone could feel more comfortable writing in/commenting. We need more places to write hanzi, but maybe the previous zh.blog was too segmented, advanced and etc. I know there’s a place in the Forum to write, but I just don’t regularly enough get myself clicking over to that area and we do need a moderator/main writer of some sort to spark our ideas and discussion.
How about a Chinese cblog where instead of the main writer ‘writing’ big posts, they could just post one-or-two liners tangentially related to the daily podcasts and their JOB is actually to ‘correct’ our comments. This way any BigBrain could write a comment in Chinese and get some corrections. This way we could all see and learn together!
好不好！
I don’t want to undermind the fondations of this thread but could you put a full light on “A misplaced fourth tone and “Can I ask you’ becomes ‘Can I kiss you?’”.
请问 qing3wen4 and 亲问 qin1wen4 are different in sound and tone.
That was maybe the 亲 qing4 of 亲家(parents and relative by marriage) but in this case 亲问 qing4wen4 will be a unlikely “asking parents”.
I’ve never tested that but I yhink an interjection of Qingwen (whatever the tones) will be understood as 请问.
Lantian,
The writing blog is a good idea. For now, however, I don’t have anyone to oversee it.
I could accept a simple blog post each day and leaving people to their own devices to comment on it and practice writing. I’m sure, however, that many users would want systematic corrections. I don’t have a staff member to do that right now, but I guess we could invite a guest to do it if they were willing to do so.
Ken Carroll
Here we are again - teaching vs. providing teaching materials. Teaching is 1-1, teaching-materials 1-n. Different type of business…
But writing and haven the results corrected is a powerful learning approach, although it sure binds manpower (womanpower? Aggiepower? whatever is most suitable & PC here). As a midterm solution I could imagine a reactivation of your teachers’ network in combination with a centralized payment-model (as Lantian suggested someplace else) + defined service chunks. E.g. correcting a piece of written homework with a defined max-length. The homework assignements would come from CPod like the lesson plans, the rest would be outsourced to the “Joint Venture CPod teachers”.