The years had built up around Stewart like the shell of a mollusk. And truth be told, he had drifted into the financial industry largely for this reason: the sedate pace and lulling security of asset management work. It had never seemed terribly risky. Or at least not until the first wave of layoffs earlier in the spring. Until then he had never even considered leaving the bank, let alone making a more aggressive career move and starting afresh in an entirely new profession.

Note: our lesson for today is an Intermediate comprehension test. Get started by listening to our short dialogue and then clicking through to the quiz section and seeing how much you understood. Some of the answers fly by quickly. If you need help though, we've manually annotated the entire dialogue on our regular text page. Consult the transcript after taking the test if you have any difficulty picking up on what is happening.
 said on
January 2, 2010
Wow that was lightning fast. Gotta be quick when stashing the loot though.

One thing I am still fuzzy on are the words that I've found for payday. In this dialogue "发工资" was used. I've also heard this one "发薪日". Also when talking about salary what is the difference between "薪水" and "工资"? Are there some cultural nuances floating beneath the surface here?
 said on
January 2, 2010
@paglino9

"发薪日" is new to me. I have to guess the meaning looking at it, "payday". But if someone says this to me, I would not be able to form these three characters in my mind and would be confused. I guess this is a literal translation from the word "payday".

"工资" and “薪水” are interchangeable. The only difference I can think of is that "工资" is more formal and written on contract. Another word for salary is "人工". This is quite Cantonese-y, but can be understood in Mandarin.
 said on
January 2, 2010
@paglino9,

发薪日 is just a bit formal. We usually just say 发工资的日子。

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
July 9, 2011
"你给我塞到书架里啊": 为什么‘塞’ 在这个句子里发sei1(Q10)而不发sai1? 其实我字典里没有sei1, 只有sai1/sai4/se4 这三个选择。 谢谢!
 said on
July 9, 2011
@huyilin,

因为这个是方言,也是口语里经常用的一种说法。

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
July 9, 2011
啊, 原来是这样!
 said on
February 23, 2015
好像这个男人说“快把这个包裹。。。” 他真的说“包给我”吗?

 said on
February 23, 2015
@ccd1994,

把这个包给我藏起来!

把 [object] 给我藏起来

把 [object] [propositional phrase] 藏起来

take [this bag] [for me] hide it

--david
 said on
April 15, 2017
I have a question about the clause "千万别被人发现" translated as "don't let anyone find out". My understanding is that 被 is a passive marker particle, so shouldn't there be a 让 "let“ somewhere in the sentence?
 said on
April 25, 2017
There are always many possible translations. You can translate that sentence as "don't let yourself be found out" if you want to be specific. Generally, our sentence translations aim for colloquial expressions that capture the proper emotion, not word-by-word translations. The popups on the transcripts are intended for the latter purpose.