Hands trussed behind his back as the thieves ransacked his flat, the diamond merchant reflected with unromantic detachment that this could be the work of almost any of his colleagues. Yet he was not totally unprepared for this eventuality, which was why his thoughts kept returning to his home security system. "There's a special wireless mode enabled by default," the salesperson had confided in him. "It can't be bypassed by cutting the wire, and when the alarm is forcibly disabled it will alert us through secondary channels."

Learning Chinese? Our Elementary level at Popup Chinese is where things get a bit more complicated. By this level you should already know the basics and be able to parse simple sentences. This lets us start exploring more complicated grammar structures and more colloquial expressions that are harder to translate literally into English. But we still do this within the context of dialogues that showcase the sort of genuine mandarin you'll hear the next time you're trussed up in a home invasion waiting for the police to arrive.