Just caught this in trailer in the theaters. Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro made the first movie, which was the best film John Woo has made in ages, maybe even since he was back in Hong Kong.

Hi guys. We're trying to gauge the degree of interest people might have in Cantonese podcasts. There are quite a few options out there - regular Cantonese-English lessons, lessons aiming at teaching Cantonese to mandarin speakers (no English). Everything from a weekly/biweekly show to possibly even setting up a completely separate site for Cantonese learners. Thoughts?

Echo, regarding Basic+ 12months > will i be able to mouse over text for audio, pinyin and translation in each lesson >if i have questions regarding vocab/lesson transcript can i receive reply with pinyin. i know i need to learn characters > this is an attempt at a third language (self-taught since Nov/08) i'm at beginning of elementary and progressing well. > looking foreward to popupchinese and its community

If you've set your preferences to receive our occasional newsletter, you should receive this in your inbox sometime soon. If you haven't this is what you're missing.

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Popup Chinese Newsletter: April 2 If you've listened to Film Friday recently, you'll know that writer and director Frank Fradella has been in town. In addition to appearing on two of our regular shows. Frank helped organize a photo shoot for us in early March. We headed out to the park system that snakes north of the Forbidden City not far from our hutong offices, and spent the afternoon taking photos. So if you haven't seen the people behind our operations here in Beijing, drop by Frank's blog and check them out. Those of you who are part of the Apple fan club will be pleased to hear that Frank has given our starlet a photo gallery of her very own. [http://frankfradella.com/?p=231]

We've just put up a new Popup Chinese video. If you're not logged in, you'll probably already have noticed it sitting right there on the front page. If you are logged in try logging out for a bit and you'll be able to see it too. Right on the main page: http://popupchinese.com Our goal with this video is to help new visitors understand a bit more about what we do and get a sense for some of the people who are working here behind the scenes. We also tip the hat a bit about some of the things that set us apart as the best resource on the web for serious Chinese language study.

We just got a nice review from the folks at FreeLanguage.org, a good site with a collection of links to online language learning materials and resources in a number of languages (including less common languages like Catalan). If you're interested in reading a very nice take on what we're doing, feel free to check it out. The site has lots of of decent resources out there for other languages, including less commonly studied ones such as Catalan.

想亲眼看一看Popupchinese背后的帅哥美女们吗？ 想亲眼看一看Popupchinese在哪里吗？ 听过这么多播客，我猜你一定很熟悉我们的声音了，来看一看Frank为我们拍的视频—— http://frankfradella.com/ 今天我们不猜电影，你能猜出哪一个是Echo吗？嘻嘻... If you have known the answer, don't forget to write to me at echo@popupchinese.com ;)

I'm sort of impressed. The New York Times has just put up an article about one of our favorite animals, the mud-grass horse. We were actually going to do this video for KTV Wednesday one of these days - but have been a bit hesistant since the language is pretty extreme.... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?hp

Frank Fradella is an old friend from my days in Shanghai and those of you who read his always-entertaining blog will know about his recent trip to Beijing. It's been good to see him again, and the friendship angle probably also explains how we managed to get such a great photographer to come out and help us with a weekend photo shoot. And it was a fantastic shoot. If you were anywhere in the vicinity of Houhai last Saturday afternoon, in fact, I'd be surprised if you didn't hear the commotion. As Frank describes it:

We've just enabled our new vocabulary import feature. You can find it on the right sidebar of your vocabulary page. This tool allows you to upload files that contain words and have them added to your vocabulary list right on our site. The files you provide should be either comma or tab separated, and contain the following four fields in any order: