The film Inception has just been released in China. And to celebrate this amazing movie, we've decided to launch Inception Week at Popup Chinese. Starting on Monday in Beijing, join us every day for the next seven days as we release a podcast a day on a topic inspired by this film. These lessons will span all difficulty levels and touch on questions as diverse as the paradox of life-as-a-dream, our thoughts on film-making and film analysis, and even the logistics of driving a van filled with drugged narcoleptics into a river.

As our older users will know, we also have a second reason to celebrate: this week marks our second anniversary. When we launched Popup Chinese in the fall of 2008, a lot of people told us there was no market for Chinese learning materials designed for... well... sentient adults. With more than 800 freely-downloadable lessons under our collective belt, we're glad to have proved them wrong, and have had a lot of fun in the process. Which is another reason for this series: Inception covers a topic we find fascinating and inspiring and we want to spend more time talking and thinking about this film.

If you hate Inception for some unknown reason, you can always take a break and come back on September 13th. In the meantime, even if you aren't a film buff, we'd also like to give you an extra special reason to visit us online. To celebrate two years of podcasting excellence, we'll be running a buy-one-get-one-free sale for the next seven days only. Purchase a basic or premium subscription to Popup Chinese in the next week and we'll give a friend of yours a second subscription absolutely free-of-charge. Just place your order and send us an email with your friend's email address. We won't have another offer like this in a long time, if ever, so if you've been putting off subscribing while waiting for a good deal, we encourage you to take advantage of it.
 said on
September 6, 2010
Happy Second year!

i believe it is a good idea to have story lines based on the Inception movie. it is easy to memorize and relate words, sentences to movies.
 said on
September 6, 2010
an innovative series > hao zhuyi

you said 'These lessons will span all difficulty levels' will they be annotated so that a beginner can learn basic sentence structures + a few new words?

zhu ni > many more yrs
 said on
September 6, 2010
Thanks guys,

We've had a lot of fun doing all the dialogues for this one. The first lesson -- an advanced discussion of the film -- is going to come out a bit later this morning. There's no dialogue for that one, but we'll have the usual annotated texts, vocabulary lists, etc. for the other lessons as usual.

Year three... here we come. :)

--david

Mark Lesson Studied