Xiao Luo stared at the business card with the patience and intensity of an archeologist exhuming an ancient Pharoh. Unexpectedly, the combination of her own sweat and the Shanghai summer heat had given the once cream-colored paper a greyish-blue tint, and smudged the delicate combination of numbers and letters which had previously been the email address of the most important businessman in her field. Could she reconstruct it from memory?

Learning Chinese? This lesson has one of our more difficult dialogues at the Absolute Beginner level, although we try to work you up to it slowly. Nonetheless, if you are a total beginning to mandarin, you'll probably want to start with an easier show from our beginner lesson archive. If you've already got a few under your belt though, join us for this show and learn all the Chinese you need to ask for someone's email address. If you're new to China, you'll find this is oddly more difficult than it is abroad.