As the wounded lion collapsed in the grass several feet away, its claws still quivering, Francis Macomber reached into his satchel and pulled out his flask of Fanta. Raising its spout to his lips against the late afternoon sun, the hunter smiled as the familiar orange taste flooded his mouth. A little bit of Fanta was just the thing to buck a man's courage, he thought to himself. It boosted you up. Made you feel more sure of yourself, and even steadied your aim. Macomber never left base camp without it.

While China may not offer the same thrill of the hunt as Africa, ordering dinner in this country can be life-threatening in other ways, so it's important to be prepared. And as Hemingway recounted in his famous short story, what better way is there to prepare than with the comfort of everyone's favorite orange soda. Available almost anywhere in China, Fanta is such a special drink here that we've given it a podcast of its very own.
 said on
September 29, 2010
A quick note -- we've just hooked our Writing Pad up to lesson and user vocabulary lists. This makes it possible to practice writing lists of arbitrary characters. Just click on our new "practice writing" button to load the Writing Pad and get started.

We don't have every single character in the system, but the writing pad supports over 700 characters now and covers all of the Absolute Beginner content. By the end of next month it should cover all of our Elementary content too. So anyone who is new to writing characters in Chinese should find this fairly usable right from the start.

We're adding between 200 and 300 characters a month on average, so the scope of our coverage will increase silently over time. We're aiming to add the top 3000 characters and figure out the rest from there. In the meantime, happy character writing! And we hope you enjoy this podcast as always, even if it does showcase the dark side of Brendan's prescriptivist (imperialist?) approach to measure words.

 said on
June 6, 2012
6'50" It comes from the heart - hahahaha

一罐 is alive and well in Sichuan by the way, Northern prescriptivist efforts notwithstanding.
 said on
June 9, 2012
In this lesson's vocab, the traditional form of 瓶 is mislisted as 聽
 said on
June 9, 2012
@murrayjames,

搞定啦,谢谢。

--Amber

amber@popupchinese.com