Next Audio translation

The last audio exercise I did I had my teacher beside me to guide me along.

The next one I had to do myself as homework to add a little challenge.  It's not meant to be difficult since the audio track follows a conversation that tries to use the words you learned in that chapter or fairly common words that have been used in many previous exercises.  Of course a few words end up in there that had not been covered so they can be a bit tricky.  There are a few ways to try and figure them out.  The first is to get the context of the sentence and make a best guess, or reference the attached text form of the audio (only in Chinese characters) and try to search that/those characters through an app or online.   Finally, the easiest way which could be considered cheating is to use google translate app and have it listen to the audio and give a direct translation.   This can work quite well but the audio sampling is not perfect and you often get the wrong translation.

The audio track is about a minute long and although they try to speak a bit slower it still ends up being quite fast. It wasn't a difficult one, basically there were two people discussing a friend's birthday that they were planning and talking about all the things they wanted to buy for the party.  They needed to buy all sorts of fruits, a cake and some flowers.  They also made a note that they didn't need to buy beverages because someone had already done that.  It was a very exciting conversation.

I had to find a few words that I couldn't figure out from memory.  I made every effort to solve them without using google translate and I got all except one of them.

The last word though, I just could not figure out what it meant.  It was 'Ying nan' and I wasn't able to find it in previous lessons, I also tried typing or writing the characters for this word into my Chinese characters App but I wasn't having any luck.  I didn't want to sit on this all night so I resorted to the listening function of the google translate app.  It uses the microphone to hear the word and translate it for you.  I tried it a few times by saying the word into my microphone but it didn't come up anything that made sense.  I figured it was due to my poor pronunciation so I replayed the audio track on my computer and set the phone to the speaker to hear the word.  Still it wouldn't come back with anything.

I was starting to get a bit frustrated at this point.  I kept saying the word louder and louder until eventually I was yelling into my phone.   Sometimes the app doesn't hear the word correctly and it will display a message 'Sorry, didn't get that'.  It's a to-the-point message but, after a few rounds of 'Didn't get that...Didn't get that', I really felt like this app was antagonizing me.  It was like it could tell I was getting frustrated and just wanted to mess with me.

I put my phone down, took a few deep breaths to get calm again.  I tried again...'didn't get that'....and again, 'didn't get that'...the rage was rising again so I yelled 'F**k you google translate...did you get that!!!?'   ....long pause, it was searching....'didn't get that'.  

I should have realized the ridiculousness of swearing at my phone but I wasn't able to think rationally.  I threw the phone on the couch nearby, got up and walked away.  I was furious.  I needed to walk it off. 

I came back after about 10 minutes.  I was done with trying to translate it on google and I searched my textbook one last time before giving up.  Finally, I found this 'word' hidden in an old conversation.

It was someone's name.   Fail.