Study Chinese Online From China

Learning Vocab the Hard-Drive Way

October 16, 2006 on 11:59 am | In Chinesepod Transcripts, Uncategorized |

VOCAB STRATEGIES - There’s the frequent refrain, how do I learn Chinese vocabulary?! We’ve all heard the various strategies, flashcards, get out and talk, learn one word a day, stickies, you name it.

I have a new strategy, let some little disaster come into your life. You’ll pick up a few new words. Mine is ‘ying pan’. Ying is the word for hard. And pan is the word for box-like. Hence the meaning ‘hard drive’.

Over the course of a week I had one computer harddrive fail. Okay, no problem I started to use the notebook. Virus. Okay, there’s the other notebook, can’t connect to the internet. The internet goes out because I hadn’t paid the landline phone. Who even uses it anymore! My life devolves into a non-tech abyss.

Anyway, this made me desparate enough to ‘keep my chin up’ and call 10000, the Chinese version of the phone company help line. You might be thinking they have an option ‘Press O’ for English. You’d be wrong! Luckily I could ‘hear’ enough to catch “#3 Shangwang fuwu”. Hey, hey, hey, did you get it, that’s Internet service. After asking for an English speaking operator I got, “Well would you like to try in Chinese?” In Chinese! Forget $10 for a Chinese lesson, come to China and mess up your phone and computers, get nice patient Chinese people speaking to you.

I am both flattered and aghast. Anyway, that was then that I learned that I couldn’t connect thru my ADSL because the houseline had gone unpaid for too long. Off to the office, cash in hand I went. “Dian hua fei” that means phone bill.

It was after I had so proudly accomplished all this, that I returned home to find the ADSL reset and me without any slip of paper of the original password. Oh boy. Another call into 1000, and hey - the super patient- operator helped me reset the password. “Mi ma” that’s password. There’s also ‘bo hao’ for something akin to username.

After this, I was really on a role and decided to do a clean re-install of WindowsXP. That’s when I really ‘hosed’ my machine. That’s ’si ji le’ from our recent Cpod lesson. I really wacked it good, my Bios couldn’t read the external CD drive, no way to boot. Yup, yup, yup. That led to my next call, to the computer guy.

I still don’t know how to say ‘operating system’ in Chinese, but luckily Microsoft has taken over the world and my mutterings of ‘….XP’ were enough for us to communicate my plight.

He came over, I had really messed everything up bad, so he took all the drives back to the office to do the installs. That’s where they are now, and why I’m at a ‘Wang ba’, internet bar. Here I also had to catch the words ‘mima yi er san si wu liu’ said in rapid-fire Chinese. That is, the password is 123456.

That all said, the Full-transcripts are slightly delayed this week. Hope you’re reviewing the previous ones!