Ever been asked a question you didn't feel like answering because of indifference to the plight of your fellow man? In this Chinese lesson for Absolute Beginners, we focus on the art of deflecting questions. As anyone who has lived or worked in China knows, this is a critical skill for maintaining your sanity here. We're sure you'll be able to use this right away.

Since we've been getting a lot of new people to the site lately, it is probably worth mentioning that our goal with the Absolute Beginner level is making each lesson accessible to people without any background in mandarin, Chinese. This lesson is a bit more difficult than most at this level though, so if you're a total beginner, we recommend clicking through to our text page to read our annotated transcript while listening to our dialogue and podcast.
 said on
September 1, 2010
it would be nice to have a quiz section for each lesson, so far i have done just a couple of quizzes. the lesson is very interesting as it is using very common popular words and probably will be high frequency.

ni neng bang mang wo ma? ni neng bang mang wo zhao wo de yao shi

你能帮忙我吗?你能帮忙我找我的钥匙?

Wo zen me zhao?

我怎么找?

 said on
September 2, 2010
i just want to mention how useful/important the annotated feature is to beginner/ele. users. a few weeks ago i would have translated 'have you seen my keys? ni jian wode laoshi le ma? because of having learn 'kan' to look and 'jian' to see .

full explanation was given with simplified/traditional characters , pinyin and english translation for combining 'kanjian' giving it 'looking for and actually seeing as a result' meaning.

@Echo, as i progress should i expect to learn many more combinations as 'kanjian' in order to give proper meaning to a sentence?
 said on
October 10, 2010
The audio review still can't be downloaded using the link.
 said on
May 3, 2013
Would it make sense in this situation to ask

你看過見我的鑰匙嗎?

then the response would be

我昨天看過見。
 said on
May 6, 2013
@lakers4sho,

The most natural way to say this is :

你看見我的鑰匙了嗎?

我昨天看見了。

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com