In no time the interlopers had progressed to the center of the industrial plant. They moved in silence with the precision of a military crew, but as the swirling oil eddied around them, it became clear that the original plan had gone awry. Had they turned a wrong corner, or was their entire adventure an unexpected trap? Whatever the explanation, there was little time to lose....Our intermediate Chinese lesson for today is a short listening test with ten devilishly difficult questions. If you fancy you've excellent Chinese take a listen and see how you do on our accompanying quiz. It is harder than you think!
hans_mtl
said on January 27, 2011
The first half of the PDF dialogue isn't in the audio file. Is this part of the test?
- H
Intermediate
said on January 27, 2011
@hans_mti,
That was apparently the super-hard version where we don't even give you the complete audio file. I've re-uploaded the full file. Thanks for complaining and sorry for the original mistake.
--david
huyilin
said on February 2, 2011
I deleted then reloaded the lesson on iTunes but the audio file is still missing the first half.
Intermediate
said on February 2, 2011
@huyilin,
That's really strange. I could have sworn that I fixed it before.... I've just gone through the motions again anyway. The player was still using the older cached version, but opening the download version and hitting refresh forced it to grab the new version.
Sorry for the problem, and thanks for the reminder it still wasn't working.
--dave
nurflight9
said on February 16, 2011
Just fyi, your transcript has a couple lines that the actors seem to have missed. Nice dialogue---would have liked to hear a lesson on this! I suspect there aren't enough of us who aren't bothering with the written language for you to feel inspired to offer these tests in pinyin...? I am, actually, totally aware that it's stupid not to learn both, as, in the long run, it doesn't really slow down your learning, but enhances it. Sigh.
trevelyan
said on February 16, 2011
@susanjallen,
If you're taking the quiz through the site, you can switch your display options to pinyin using the controls on the site. Just go to the test page and switch your preferences using the right-hand options.
The PDFs that get distributed through the RSS feeds are not customized, but if you download directly off the website they'll be regenerated based on your display preferences. So if you switch your display preference to pinyin instead of simplified or traditional Chinese, those will switch over to pinyin too.
So it should be possible to get the tests in pinyin -- although we de *do* cut the popups from the test pages so that people won't cheat. :)
Best,
--david
trevelyan
said on February 16, 2011
@susanjallen,
Yes. It looks like I screwed up the audio when reuploading the audio. I'll dig into our archives and see if I have a full version. What a disaster this lesson has been otherwise!
--dave
nurflight9
said on February 16, 2011
We all have such days...
Great that I can get it in pinyin!
huyilin
said on July 10, 2011
Seems like the audio is still not the full version (pdf has more lines than the actors').
