In the spirit of sharing a helpful tip for dealing with friends who procreate, one thing we've learned something of the hard way is the astonishing degree to which parents end up being more patient with their new offspring than they are with their non-childbearing but emotionally supportive friends, especially should one happen to make a stray remark about asking the little guy to hurry up because other people might need to go too.

Just starting to learn Chinese? Our podcast for today is one of our more difficult lessons at the Absolute Beginner level, since it presumes you've already run into the particle 了, and know it is used to put sentences into the past tense and signal what is known as a "change of state". But what you might not know is that sometimes you'll see this doubled-up in the same sentence. This lesson is about one case when this occurs, so that you can impress everyone with how native your Chinese is getting.