The largest investment for any family daring the Oregon Trail was the purchase of oxen. Bullets? Medicine? Clothing for the children? Safe passage across dangerous rivers? All of these were luxuries. Even children were a luxury, since in a worst case scenario your adults could survive on squirrel meat and repopulate once they reached the west coast. But if your oxen died? Then the grim ghosts of dysentery that stalked the trail would show no mercy.

Learning Chinese? This week on Popup Chinese we boot up the Apple II and discover the surprising amount that Chinese people know about American history. And Super Mario and Contra and strange Chinese role-playing games involving mystical swords. Also, details on the not-so-legit Nintendo gaming systems that were all the rage in the days before the XBox.
 said on
May 30, 2013
@Echo

你知道吗?Popcap 快要发另外一个《植物大战僵尸》。谢天谢地!第一版我都玩腻了。

 said on
May 31, 2013
@尼古拉斯桑,

对,我听说是在7月。我每天都在等着植物大战僵尸2,希望第二版不会让我们失望。

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
May 31, 2013
So something not related to this lesson at all...I was looking through your New HSK Level 1 Vocab list and I noticed that word 44 ”岁“ is listed as ji3...like for the sentence 你几岁?...not sure if I'm missing something, so I wanted to ask/ let you guys know :) Thanks for all the good work you guys do!
 said on
May 31, 2013
Thanks for the correction BrittanyP. It looks like we'd fixed the online wordlist, but the downloadable file still had this mistake. I've just corrected it.
 said on
June 15, 2013
歷史上最佳的遊戲明明是…… 洞窟物語! (http://www.cavestory.org/downloads_game.php) 我去年玩中文版,覺得還是挺好玩的。就是圖形有點,哎呀,怎麼說呢,retro,哈哈。
 said on
June 15, 2013
@mtpastille,

真的嗎?我也要去試一下。你的鏈結好像有點兒問題......

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
June 24, 2013
@Echo -- 在 ~11:04 David 把“hipster”这个英文词翻译成“巴陵后”,这个词到底怎么写? 谢谢!

还有,中国有没有类似于urbandictionary。com的网上词典吗?我亲爱的 dict。cn 没有这么流行的词汇。

多谢!

 said on
June 24, 2013
@墨启迪

It was Brendan, not David, and I think he said "80后" (Rough explanation: generation born in the 1980s, usually applied to young Chinese materialists, but here to Americans in the same age cohort).
 said on
June 24, 2013
Thanks!
 said on
October 18, 2013
@Brendan, I am in the same boat with respect to video games - Riven is the first game I bought, and I pre-ordered it in the US. Today's news about Cyan's Kickstarter campaign (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction) reminded me of this lesson.
 said on
October 20, 2013
Whoa! Thanks for that link, @pefferie -- news to me. I'd love to see something new from Cyan.
 said on
September 26, 2014
"当初" 的 意思 是 不 是 "开始的时候" 或 者 "当时"?
 said on
September 26, 2014
@fho71 是,非常正确