The Shenzhen company's pricing strategy was simple but effective. Five minutes after any customer arrived, they would be guided to the executive sundeck and given several glasses of cool spring water while they waited for the executive team. Once the customer was sufficiently hydrated, their counterparts would arrive with apologies and a gift of the region's finest green tea. After several toasts, the pricing negotiations were never quite as protracted as some customers may have wished.

Learning Chinese? Our elementary lessons at Popup Chinese stretch beyond the baics into dialogues which feature more complex constructions. While these feature common sentence patterns and can help you push your way to fluency, they also highlight the same sort of conversational and colloquial speech you'll find spoken every day in mainland China. So if you're learning Chinese, give us a listen and hear for yourself how much different real spoken Chinese is from the dry, unnatural texts you may be accustomed to from other textbooks.