A candlelit dinner for two at a small garden restaurant near Houhai? A romantic walk beneath the stars through ancient imperial gardens? When you find the girl (or guy) of your dreams, you'll want to know the best Beijing has for great date locations that will sweep them off their feet.In this podcast we expose the latest date craze to hit Beijing, and we're not talking about any of the clubs listed in The Beijinger. This is a dream come true for the more budget-conscious Casanova, as well as anyone who simply likes checking email.
barrister
said on December 16, 2008
Hard to believe, but true. I used to spend some time at an Internet Cafe near my apartment. It was basically a vast underground hall filled with smoke, computers and university aged students.
I don't know how much romance was actually going on, but there were definitely couples there playing games together.
marco64
said on December 16, 2008
The one I went to was far too smokey - I couldn't take being in the room for more than about 20 minutes. Heard they cracked down on that for the Olympics, which is a good thing considering it's mostly kids puffing away. Recipe for lung cancer for anyone who spends serious time in those places. Can't imagine what it would be like to have to work there.
weijin
said on December 18, 2008
that tune is driving me crazy. 还是想不起到底在哪里听过的。
bryan
said on January 6, 2009
Just a quick FYI to the crew: There is no PDF/Text transcript option listed for this lesson.
nadasax
said on June 11, 2009
good lesson =) humor, pop culture, good recording
jyh
said on December 10, 2009
The link to the pdf transcript seems to be broken.
Incidentally, the error message (or at least, the .tex extension in that error message) seems to indicate that you use latex to produce these pdf transcripts. Is this indeed the case? If it is, do you use any special package or macro set? Is it easy to input Chinese into latex? I didn't even think of using it to write down my personal notes on the lessons.
trevelyan
said on December 10, 2009
@jyh - Setting up Latex to produce Chinese output is not that difficult, but adding support for tonal pinyin can be a nightmare since it involves messing around with the fonts. It's possible but not really easy or well documented. I'll send you a copy of one of our raw .tex files if you're interested so you can see what we're doing.Oh - issue with the PDF is fixed. We were tripping over the third tone in dia3 (unsupported, now handled with a bit of a workaround). There are a lot of these sorts of small issues. We're catching most of them these days, but when we started it was common enough for us to put up the error message.
jyh
said on December 11, 2009
@trevelyan - thanks for fixing the pdf.
I would really appreciate if you could send me that raw .tex file. I have a hard time understanding both how you can set it up and then once you have set it up how it could be hard to get tonal pinyin to work reasonably easily. Maybe once I look at the file I will understand why my uneducated guess is the exact opposite of reality :-)
trevelyan
said on December 12, 2009
@jyh - 应该的. and thanks for the feedback on the pdf as well. if you have any other suggestions moving forward please do let us know. it would be useful to be able to change the formatting quite easily with multiple stylesheets, etc..
nurflight9
said on February 16, 2011
This is probably an ludicrous question from an "almost intermediate". Maybe I'm not as "almost" as I'd like to think! Anyway, though I had forgotten much of what I learned during my year studying Mandarin in Taiwan 35 years ago, on return, some things still stick in my mind as automatic as I relearn Mandarin here. One of these instincts is to say "zhei" or "zheige" instead of "zhe" or "zhege". In fact, for some reason, I can't bring myself to say zhe or zhege as it sounds so unnatural to my ear. I was assuming that it was just a Taiwanism or a "not-Beijingism" (since I've heard it here in Guangdong), but in this lesson I think I heard Brendon very briefly say "zhege or zheige..." as if there were a choice. Could you tell me what the difference is and if they really use it in some circumstances in standard Mandarin?
Echo
said on February 18, 2011
@susanjallen,
"Zhe4" and "zhei4" is interchangeable in Mandarin. Same to "na4" and "nei4". "Zhei4" and "nei4" come from "zhe4 yi1" and "na4 yi1". You can feel free to use whichever you like.
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
nurflight9
said on February 18, 2011
Thanks! Wow, I had no idea---wondering how I could miss something so basic!
