The sheer scale of Emilio Largo's China operations -- including the military bunker in which James found himself sequestered -- suggested far more menacing plans than the mere narcotics-smuggling suspected in London. But there were more questions here than how MI5 had missed the rebirth of SPECTRE, such as how his former adversary had survived their last encounter, or how anyone could setup such a labyrinthine operation in Shanghai without attracting the attention of the Chinese government?

As the sun rose into view through the cell window, James' thoughts turned back to the question of why he was still alive. Perhaps Largo was simply unsure of what exactly Britain knew. If true, this offered some small point of leverage for the imprisoned spy, although after thirty hours without sleep James wondered if he could possibly be alert enough to seize any advantage afforded by it when meeting Emilio later this morning. What he really needed was a coffee.
 said on
July 19, 2012
there seems to be some typographical error in the pinyin portion of the last part of the transcript:

看来只有一个的的 - maybe it should be 看来只有一个人的

zhèr 没yǒu nǐ de kāfēi - the 没 did not convert to pinyin correctly

 said on
July 19, 2012
@jasper.obviar,

Fixed. Thank you!

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
July 22, 2012
Oh god, don't remind me about the 3-in-1 coffee blend. I'm about to re-live the horror
 said on
September 8, 2012
Thanks for another great podcast. I really like this sentence:

恐怕我是跟你开玩笑的

But I don't really understand what 开 is doing here. Can you please explain further?

Thanks a lot!
 said on
September 8, 2012
@Mooreharry_2,

恐怕 could mean "fear" or "dread", but here it means the English set phrase, "I'm afraid that".

So the whole phrase means, "I'm afraid that I was joking (with you)".

开 is part of the Chinese set phrase, 开玩笑 which means "to joke", so you could understand "开" here as a necessary verb to complete the phrase 开玩笑.

 said on
May 5, 2013
Hey, this is probably the umpteen millionth time you've been asked, but ... what's the music in the background?

I really like it.
 said on
May 6, 2013
@fields.emmett,

No problem. Actually most people have asked about another background music, not this one. This is just a very short part of some classical Chinese music. We are not sure about the name either.

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
November 8, 2013
Hi, could you please give some other examples of sentence adverbs that work in the same way as 恐怕 ? i.e. which usually go at the beginning of the sentence, and can't be used as adjectives?