Podcasts: Ricky Gervais & learning chinese

Well, I finally decided to take a spin around the wierd and wonderful world of podcasts on friday evening, as some friends had been raving on about the Ricky Gervais podcasts. Went on, downloaded them, played them on the way down to galway on the train. Maybe it's cos I was never a real big fan of the office, but I couldn't see what the big deal was, how this got to be "the #1 podcast in the world". It basically seems to conist of one guy (Karl) talking on about random shyte in a way that makes him out to be a bit of a thicko, and Ricky Gervais and some other guy (Steve) making fun of him and calling him a thicko! Seems the biggest contribution Gervais makes is laughing at the other guy!

After that I went and got an audiobook entitled "In-flight mandarin chinese: learn before you land". It's basically an hour-long book on learning useful chinese phrases etc, and you're supposed to listen to it on the flight on the way over. Well, it's a good job that it's a 10-11hr flight, 'cos with the speed they go through the phrases there's no way you'd pick it up in one or two listens, unless you had a photographic memory (or whatever the audio equivalent is). Also, like most of these type of linguaphone things, they give you phrases in isolation. I mean, there's not much point in learning how to say "can you recommend me any good restaurants around here?" if you can't understand the bloody reply!

There is some useful stuff in it too tho, so I will hopefully get something out of it. Basically listened though the whole thing the first time without even trying to memorize anything, going to do that a few times before I start trying to commit stuff to memory. It didn't really help as well that I had a bit of difficulty hearing everything on the train over the sounds of the group of dubs sitting in the same train carriage on the way back from galway. There may be one or two things I'll miss when I go away, but hearing "Staahree buuud!" isn't on of them!

One thing I realised as well listning to the taps as well was that I thought I was off to a good start with knowing how to say "please", "thank you", "hello", "goodbye" and "happy new year" in chinese, but then I go listening to the audiobook and realise that while I knew them from being in Hong Kong, ppl in Hong Kong speak Cantonese and ppl in Beijing speak Mandarin! The only phrase that was the same was "Ni Hau!".