In his nightmares, the ball ricocheted off the table in slow motion again and again, its downward darting spin pulling it past his outstretched paddle. And then the roar of the crowd and the sting of defeat. In fifteen years of professional play, this was the worst humiliation he had ever suffered: defeated on the match point without even making paddle contact. But what could he have done? The seventy year old had better form and unbreakable concentration.

While we can't improve your game, today we take a short break from our normal podcasts with a video that's shows what life is like over here. And for bonus points it may help you take your game to the next level. Anthony, Echo, Qin and Tiansen put this together in an afternoon of hanging with the local retired cadres. It was fun, even if we discovered that Tiansen gets dangerously into his game at times.
trevelyan
 said on
November 11, 2009
Our dictation exercises are still a bit flaky, but the video should play for everyone. Let us know what you think, as we're still working out exactly what we should be doing with this newfangled non-audio technology.

paglino9
 said on
November 11, 2009
I guess "太菜了" is the closest translation I'm gonna get in Chinese for the word "NEWB". I'll take it.
toneandcolor
 said on
November 11, 2009
That reminds me of 菜鸟, the popular translation for "newbie". 有人知道这个词的词源是什么吗？
Echo
 said on
November 11, 2009
@paglino9 & toneandcolor,

I think this word "菜鸟" came from the internet in late 90s. It was a 网络用语, and has been widely used later on -- like 菜/菜鸟/歇菜.

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
coljoe
 said on
November 22, 2009
Hey Echo,

Whats the name of the song that comes on at the end. It sounds good. Thanks.
debman3
 said on
November 22, 2009
its "my style" by 日京江羽人

you can dl it here :　http://bu.lonelylive.cn/COFFdD0xMjU4ODU4MjI5Jmk9ODIuMjMwLjE0NC4xNzImdT1Tb25ncy92MS9mYWludFFDLzVkL2QxY2MzMjFiNjFiNTUzZWUwYmU2MjkyM2ViNGQzYjVkLm1wMyZtPTY5ZTNlMTAzNzZlN2YxZTU2MjY5ZjYwMTYzYzAwNTEzJnY9Jm49TXklMjBTdHlsZSZzPcjVvqm9rdPwyMsmcD1u.mp3　
Echo
 said on
November 22, 2009
@coljoe,

Hey, actually Anthony picked up that song and kept humming it in the office afterwards, but I had no idea what the song was.

我们要谢谢 debman3 :)

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
coljoe
 said on
November 23, 2009
Debman3, 谢谢， but the link won't work for me. I found it on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BQl7b-WOmY .

Now if somebody can find the lyrics for me, that would be very helpful. 多谢。

maxiewawa
 said on
November 26, 2009
Loved it! Couldn't get the comprehension exercise working though. :(

I found Beijingers hard to understand too.
Andrews_seat
 said on
May 23, 2010
Where is the video?
malcs.lakey
 said on
May 27, 2013
Just paid my subscription, this is the first lesson I have gone to and no video. I keep getting a message telling me to let the page complete downloading before requesting video play. Still nada. oh dear
trevelyan
 said on
May 27, 2013
@malcs.lakey,

Our bad! We just launched a new video feature (http://popupchinese.com/tools/video) and need to port the functionality back to this lesson. So - yeah - this one isn't really functional right now. I'll see if we can get that fixed quickly though.

Sorry for the trouble, but thanks for the support. Hopefully you'll find the rest of the site easier to use and troublefree.

Best,

--david

malcs.lakey
 said on
May 28, 2013
Hi David, Thanks for this and all understood, no probs however, One more thing for tonight.

Just been in my study centre doing a review of work done tonight and managed the grand total of about 37/65 because most of the questions I got "wrong" were just appearing as ?? or ? or ??? with no characters to identify/read/translate. I have screenshots if useful to show you.

Many of the characters are missing from the pdf's too
trevelyan
 said on
May 28, 2013
@malcs.lakey,

This sounds bizarre. When I checked your vocabulary list I could see that some words had been saved as ??? while others had been saved normally. Without further technical details on your setup, my instinctive guess is that the problematic words (all from video lessons) are being caused when you click on words to add them to your vocab list. The reason for that would be that your browser would send the data to our server to save in your vocab list, so there is the potential for data corruption in that process in a way that isn't possible when vocab is saved from the vocab tab.

That said, I don't have any explanation for the PDFs. If you can send me a copy of one of the corrupt files I would love to take a look though. This will also help confirm whether what you are seeing is an encoding problem specific to the PDF and your account or if it is a general systems issue.

Not that it is much comfort I'm sure, but for our part, encoding problems like these are quite rare. I don't think we've had a reported case of something like this in several years now. So please do email. and when you do please let me know the details on your OS and browser (ideally browser version too).

Best,

--david

trevelyan
 said on
May 28, 2013
@malcs.lakey,

One additional tip -- if you haven't tried it yet, please try forcibly logging out and then logging-in again. Every now and then problems with cookies can cause strange behavior with browser authentication, which might be affecting API access in some way.

Not likely to solve the problem, but useful to check just to wipe a couple of potential problems off the table.

--david