Today we’d like to bring something new - an audio show called ‘Qing Wen’. Qing Wen answers to your questions about speaking Chinese. The hosts, Amber and Connie, have been answering your questions on ChinesePod.com for the last year, but now we bring you a sample of their great work in audio format.
The questions are all real. We gather them from Aggie’s Practice Plan learners. The Practice Plan gives learners the chance to practice speaking through daily Skype calls with a ChinesePod counselor. In today’s show, Amber and Connine look at the verb ‘kan‘, to look, and the expression,’kan qi lai‘, meaning ‘to appear to be‘. This episode is suitable for Newbie and Elementary learners.
Qing Wen will be a regular offering. The questions will come from the Practic e Plan learners, but if you have a pressing issue you’d like to know about, feel free to post it here.
[The question in today’s audio actually came from a woman, not a man, as I wrongly suggested in the audio.]
Ken Carroll
My question :
Why is 请问 written in traditional chinese here ?
kmk,
I chose the font becaue it looks good. No other reason. I just like it.
Wha did you tink of the show?
Ken Carroll
I think this is a good community-oriented idea for level between newbie and elementary.
Love it.
Great new feature.
I am to the point to where I can understand about 20% of the conversations in 请问.This is really a great addition to ChinesePod. It would be good if you could make these conversations downloadable so that I can listen to them with my audio program that allows me to replay sections so I can try to understand the sounds and conversation. Amber has done a good job of answering questions in the lesson sections and this just adds more power to the process. Keep coming up with good ideas!
Really cool. I like the fact that Connie speaks only in Chinese. It forces me to pay attention and listen.
Sounds great. Will it be available through the regular feed or through the extras feed?
Great show.
The topic is for elementary learners, but the style is similar to intermediate lessons in that the native speaker speaks only in Chinese. Therefore, this Qing Wen lesson is also suitable for “bridging the gap” between elementary and intermediate lessons.
Great Show!
“Qing Wen” ting qi lai feichang hao!
Sounds to me like Connie and Amber are destined to be HUGE stars, soon to be recognized all over the world like Jenny Zhu. I give it three months before this show turns Connie and Amber into first rate Divas, demanding champagne, chocolates and fresh-cut fruit in their cubicle every morning to even show up to work each day…
Thanks for the great addition to Chinesepod!
I loved it. Please please add this to one of the feeds!
This is a great feature. Please make it easier to find!
Thumbs up from me! As a newbie I’d say this is newbie/elementary language taken at intermediate speed. Please add it to the feeds.
Very nice, Ken. And you know I don’t pass out gratuitous compliments
This appears to be part of what you were alluding to in another thread; making some of the material less passive. I LOVE the concept of a hybrid show; someone doing straight Mandarin and the others giving color commentary in English and keeping us on track by echoing the key words and phrases. You almost fool me into thinking I could solo — and that’s a wonderful and MOTIVATING feeling. I do comprehend more than I would have thought. I might be close to a plateau.
Just keep the pipa player on a short leash.
Cool, looking forward to more.
Ken,
How many of these shows can we expect each week?
great,cool,…
please amber,connie run the TSS with Jenny Zhu too !!! (that´s also a nice rime is it? just thought of it…)
非常好！ Where will these end up on the site? The Extra site? If so, please make the link to the Extra page more noticeable.
That’s great - Chinesepod continues to innovate. Well done! Where will we find these lessons in future? By the way, I love these short tid-bits, like word on the street. I’m guessing they are popular with everyone else too.
Do you plan on adding any brief notes with these? I had to look up the characters 看起来 (kànqǐlái) for instance, to double-check.
Ken,
The danger of doing a breezy (in a good sense) grammar lesson is that you can say something in passing that is not entirely accurate.
When asked if you can use qilai elsewhere we were left with a strong impression that it is only used with sense verbs. Well, of course this is not true. Qilai can and is used with a whole range of other verbs as well.
My biggest question is this- in giving grammar explanations should one strive for accuracy and completeness first, or memorability and a certain ease of explanation first?
I think oral explanations usually lend themselves to the second while written explanations lend themselves to the first.
I can see how this kind of lesson will be much, much harder to produce.
Great show. Good format. One suggestion. Turn down the background music “yidian”. It made it hard to listen to the chinese. (Can that be said “zuo de zhong wen ting xi lai nan le”?)
Hi Michael,
You’re right! There are a few different forms of the structure: V 起来 (V qǐlái).
Since our Pratice Plan user’s question was specifically about 看起来 (kàn qǐlái), in this podcast we addressed this specific usage of “起来” (qǐlái). “Qǐng Wèn” is designed to teach in “tidbits,” responding to our ChinesePod user’s questions. We don’t want to overwhelm Newbie or Elementary learners with too much information. So this podcast was to specifically explain this kind of “起来” (qǐlái).
Stay tuned for more lessons on the other usages of “起来” (qǐlái), and much more!
TaiPan,
Oh, but alas, didn’t you know that Ken already brings us champagne and peeled grapes to our cubicles every morning? Oh poor you, Los Angeles-based ChinesePoddie, you must come and tour our ChinesePod world. How do you think he gets us Divas to actually do any work around here?! heh heh!
hi lester,
You’re right, you can use 听起来 (tīng qǐlái) to tell us that you feel the background music is too loud:
我觉得背景音乐听起来太大声了。
(Wǒ juéde bèijǐng yīnyuè tīng qǐlái tài dà shēng le.)
Excellent! Glad to see you using what you learned already!
Nice Addition. Please add to regular feeds. Great to hear other interesting voices.
Amber,
You’re right, you guys started to talk specifically about Kanqilai. But then it morphed into a discussion of sense verbs with qilai (a much broader discussion). At this point I felt that you suggested that qulai couldn’t be used with other verbs. Broadening your discussion to include other qilai verbs at this point would, I think, have been a mistake (especially since you want to speak in tidbits). On the other hand, drawing this circle around sense verbs plus qilai might also have been a mistake.
I hope I’m not sounding overly critical here. I’m just giving you my impression of what I heard.
It’s good to be able to read both Traditional and Simplfied Chinese characters. One can’t sweep aside thousands of years of Traditional characters.
It’s nice to finally hear Amber’s voice, both English and Chinese, which is not as good as Connie’s but leaps better than Ken. No Offence Ken, but others have commented in the past about your XinJiang Chinese.
I would hope in the future, that Connie and Amber become the primarly hosts of QingWen Questions].
Oh, this is the Beginners section? I don’t see much difference between the Beginners and Elmentary. Basically, Elementary is still beginners.
I’m tempted to say Kitty, Kitty, Kitty … but wait! XingJiang Chinese? That may be accurate but you’ve just insulted the good people of XinJiang! (Though I guess they can live with it.)
Ken Carroll
This is fantastic. I can’t wait until it’s a regular feature. You folks are amazing.
This is a really nice feature. I hope you’ll do this for different levels. You could explain confusing vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation difficulties, or give advice about to improve fluency and other skills. I imagine that you could link these explanations to relevant lessons or to relevant sections of the grammar guide.
Great idea!
I really enjoyed this - I’ve been listening to the newbie podcasts since January (just finished the back catalogue this morning!) and it was such a pleasure to be able to keep up with the gist of the explanations.
On the subject of Ken’s english OR chinese - a lot of people talk about how they love Jenny’s voice, and I’m no exception, but it’s listening to Ken’s weird mid-Atlantic-hua that keeps me hooked (a gender thing I guess
Great show! A good substitute for the “Word On the Street” perhaps? Not sure if we’ll see those again seeing that Aric is gone and CPOD seems to be revamping. I’d love to have this landing in my iTunes once a week.
I love this feature, but would like to echo the sentiments of several other posters. Please make this easier to find.
GREAT feature. First rate development, and keep it up! And to echo FuDaWei, I always enjoy one speaker strictly using Mandarin, and a little bit of English thrown in hear and there.
Ken,
I’m wondering your thoughts, and maybe this warrants a whole blog entry and feedback from “the big brain” on “The Pinyin Wall” that many learners hit when studying Chinese. They study spoken Chinese for so long that it just gets to a point where you know SOO many uses for shi4th tone that you can’t keep it straight. Many learners I know turned to characters at this point to help their brain organize the information better. Is there any worry with this in ChinesePod, since the lessons are only spoken? Or is there an assumption that Upper Intermediate/Advanced learners will have encountered this and seen the need to study characters on their own to progress further? I guess the main question is, can somebody become an “Advanced” Mandarin speaker, and not know any characters???
If you have covered this before, please feel free to post a link to the blog entry and I will dutifully read.
-Matt in Chongqing
8 straight days of rain! Those parents waiting outside the gaokao gates are throughly soaked!
Hmmm…I was wondering about the use of 耶 (as a particle). I got hooked watching Hana Kimi, and it seems like every other sentence has 耶 tacked on at the end. What exactly does this mean? Or does it have a real meaning at all? Or, is this just a Taiwan thing? I asked about this in another Chinese language forum, and two people replied saying that 1) mostly girls say this, and 2) that it expresses a happy feeling, but in the show it didn’t seem that this was the case necessarily.
It’s great to hear easy material spoken at a nice bouncy pace at last! Very well done, appealing to listen to, and economical use of the listener’s time. I can pick up an important piece of knowledge with a single quick listen during smoko, instead of setting aside 10-15 minutes to get it in a context and have a whole experience. Very useful, straight to the point, and easy to repeat it if I needed to check something later.
If you listen carefully, it’s running at three speeds simultaneously. There’s the full pace in Mandarin, the bouncy but easy enough learning pace in English with Mandarin examples, and Ken bringing it all together for anyone who couldn’t quite keep up. Clever, effective. Everyone can approach it on a different level.
The music is definitely a problem. I didn’t mind it in those old podcasts when a few people found it distracting, but here it’s a very strong distraction. It’s a shame because the music does a lot to create and sustain the mood, however this format needs complete concentration all the way through, and unfortunately having music in the background doesn’t allow that to happen.
Finally back and listened to this one.
I agree with all the positive posts above. It is John’s old Grammar tags springing to life.
Maybe you can actually use it that way (in addition and linked to the upcoming grammar guide)?
It’s nice to wsee such a positive response to Qing Wen. I’m really big on audio at the moment. I think we haven’t exploited anything near its full potential. With this kind of feedback from the Big Brain we can really go places.
The idea here is to develop extra materials for premium users. Audio can free the learning more and more from the computer - many of you have told us you want to do that. I’m looking at how it might be used to teach grammar, though it’s still early days.
In the meantime, we’re going to try some more experiments. One of these is quite ambitious. I think you’ll see that in a few days.
Ken Carroll