As many of you know, over the last few years we've had a few commentators ask for more advanced lessons focused on low-frequency vocab acquisition. Most of these have taken the form of requests for more difficult dialogue-based lessons. As I don't think we've necessarily done a good job of explaining why we haven't done this, the problem that we are running into is that putting low-frequency vocabulary into colloquial speech is actually really challenging, and almost always requires the speakers to sacrifice at least one if not all of the three most important elements in engaging dramatic speech: creativity, natural emotion or colloquial expressiveness.

Most upper-level Chinese-teaching materials don't worry about this sort of thing, and tend to feature artificial dialogues that engage in what we call "vocab stuffing": a tendency to cram low-frequency words into dialogues in unnatural and often boring ways simply to include the words. The problem is that Chinese speakers don't talk like this, and we don't want to be producing these sorts of materials since we've never found them very useful ourselves.

But we are excited about this show, because we think it gets us close to some of the most important things we think an upper-level show needs to feature. The first is obviously the need to keep things fun and interesting. The second is broad coverage of a wide range of low-frequency but socially-useful vocabulary. And finally there is the need to frame things in a way that can help the words stick, so the materials are easier to remember and we don't end up with basically semi-random lists of thematically-related words.

Anyway, all of us at Popup Chinese like the new show very much. That said, it is still a work in progress and we want to get feedback from you about what you like and what you'd like to change. Also, if you have trivia questions you'd like us to ask in future episodes, or are in Beijing and are interested in being a contestant on the show yourself, please write us and let us know.

And good luck with the questions.

@孔瑞 - looks like a typo. Your comment says "evil" when it should clearly say "better". ;)

Is it just me or does anyone else smell Texas BBQ? :-) Seriously though, very cool concept!

That was a cool show! For the future, you might try to concentrate on one topic for each quizz night, roughly? Like arts, literature, history, science, computers, etc. This way the presented vocab wouldnt be too random but still cover a broad range of things?

I'm a newbie to Popup and it's developments like this (as well as the quality, content and sheer likeability of the main presenters) that made me 'go Premium'.

This quiz is a great idea and I've learnt quite a lot of words which I agree would feel 'jammed in' if tried within a dialogue.

I also hate learning Chinese versions of Western names but it's a very necessary evil so this is also a less painful, in-context way of doing it - bravo!

Looking forward to more quizzes!

@sekye, it's not a typo! :) Potable water means freshwater, although it may be more of a British / Canadian expression than American one.

Great Show!

@bailan,

哈哈，不小心泄露了秘密吧~

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

Good concept, and as always a pleasure to listen to the Popup Team. I second @yanuo's comment about a consistency in theme.

伊斯坦布尔不是土耳其的首都，是安卡拉。