The Cold War that had been simmering between our staff for months finally came to a head as Gail put down the phone. "Our Chinese lessons aren't easy enough," she leveled an icy glare at Brendan, who slipped his copy of "Quotations from Mencius" into his knapsack in furtive response. "We need a Chinese lesson that is so dead simple," she continued, "that even someone who can't even find China on a map can learn some of the basics of the Chinese language."

And that's how all the fun ended here at Popup Chinese, at least for this lesson. This week we've followed the advice of our "student-friendly" teacher Gail, which means our popular fun-with-Tang-Dynasty-etymology and how-did-the-Manchu-say-that podcast segments are gone, replaced with a highly-repetitive beginner lesson that will teach how you to ask who people are, and learn to understand the answers. This is a very simple lesson for anyone just starting to learn mandarin and looking for an easy way to fluency. So enjoy it while you can. The etymology can wait for another few days.
 said on
December 14, 2010
我发笑了。
 said on
December 14, 2010
@palafx,

Glad to know you like it :)

Only little suggestion though: "发笑" is a bit too formal, you can say "笑死我了" or "太搞笑了".

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
December 14, 2010
@Echo

Thank you. I struggled quite a bit with the choice of that word. "笑" seemed too vague and wiktionary didn't know any other words. :D

PS: For some reason my first attempt to respond failed. I see my response on the home page, but not on this page, and clicking on the visible response doesn't take me anywhere.
 said on
April 23, 2011
echo is that your pic er qie cong ming bu dan piao liang
 said on
April 23, 2011
@kwsu,

Haha, sorry, bu4 shi4 wo3 :(

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
 said on
April 23, 2011
how did the american man learn chinese he is very good just like da shan. your english is good, better than mine and i am a graduate hehe

 said on
May 17, 2011
Are you not going to provide the generative audio review file anymore? I think it's very useful.
 said on
May 18, 2011
@nosugar000,

We haven't lately because some of the audio recordings haven't been up to par (in terms of the background noise). We'll get these fixed and regenerated, although probably not before the end of July.

Best,

--david
 said on
May 18, 2011
David,

when you have time, could you also make sure that you have dialog-only recordings for all lessons? Those do not require new recordings and are invaluable for reviewing!

Thanks!
 said on
May 20, 2011
I second that request! Dialogue files please!

 said on
May 21, 2011
Ok, ok, ok, ok.... Dialogue files for all Intermediate and Elementary lessons are now up. I'll get the rest of the Advanced ones up this afternoon.

As far as I can tell, the lesson in this - incidentally - is to yell as often as possible instead of just being polite and listening to me when I say I'm working on it. Unless I start yelling back, in which case I probably am working on it.

 said on
May 21, 2011
@dave - LOL! We will also need a way to send private messages to each other on popup chinese so we can secretely gang up on you.