posted by inet.helen on October 27, 2010 | 6 comments
Dear Popup team,
I would like to make a suggestion. Is it possible to launch business chinese lessons and lessons of understanding legal chinese, like contracts. I'm cooperating with chinese companies, and often chinese representatives come to our company or we go to China, so I need to know how to communicate with chinese partners in business context, also lots of agreements in chinese and I need to understant them. But unfortunately there are so little materials on this topic. I think it would be helpful for people already working but still proceeding to study and master chinese language. Of course I understand that you probably already have lots of work to do in order to prepare new lessons. It's just an idea, a suggestion, maybe someday you can do it. Frankly speaking I adore your site and find it extremely useful and interesting. Thanks for your great job!
anna.kalenyuk on October 27, 2010 | reply
Yes , I agree with Helen ,great idea .
chadyanpitre on October 27, 2010 | reply
I've mentioned this to the team before. Real lack of good quality business Chinese learning materials out there, and I for one would pay a fair bit of change for some quantity and quality content on these topics.
One of the "decent" ones out there is http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Languages/Chinese/Business-Companion-Chinese/15886 thought it suffers from what most other similar learning materials out there suffer from, which is slow / unnatural pace of discussion and lack of modern expressions and concepts.
One good thing it does have is the topics it covers such as typical business meetings, negotiations, presentations, etc.
I think Helen's suggestion for legal content is good, but could probably only touch on the major stuff, since this is a highly technical field, even in English. Still, there is merit there.
@Inet.helen,
I second the notion. I too adore Popupchinese and think it would be great to have some sort of dedicated business series. The Popup team must have experience in this field, seeing that they educate business people through their corporate one-on-one plan. I wonder if it's that to do a complete business series would somewhat negate the need for corporations to utilize their 培训 series?
Maybe just the teaser trailer would be nice. I'd love to brush up on negotiations, contracts, meetings, import/export jargon, etc.
Helen and Anna and Chad,We'd love to do it. The challenge is that this isn't the sort of content we'd push into regular production on our front page. It sounds more like something that should be a custom lesson series focusing on "legal chinese".If someone is up to the task, why not put together a basic series of dialogues covering the type of language they'd like (either English or Chinese is fine - we can translate easily enough)? Then we can record the materials and add them to Popup Chinese as a special lesson series for anyone interested. Even if we don't add lengthy podcast discussions around the recordings, we can still do the recordings, produce the generative fixes, etc. and get them all up on Popup Chinese as a special lesson series.For what it's worth, this is actually an open offer that not many people take us up on. But if anyone has any dialogue or lesson requests, we're happy to record materials pretty much on demand. We have weekly dialogue recording sessions, it is usually pretty easy to add things into the mix.Best,--david
inet.helen on October 28, 2010 | reply
Dear David,
You've mentioned custom lesson series focusing on "legal chinese", please tell me do you have such lessons now? Or do you plan to do them?