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Elementary - Home Invasion
Jul 09, 2012
Show notes
Hands trussed behind his back as the thieves ransacked his flat, the diamond merchant reflected with unromantic detachment that this could be the work of almost any of his colleagues. Yet he was not totally unprepared for this eventuality, which was why his thoughts kept returning to his home security system. "There's a special wireless mode enabled by default," the salesperson had confided in him. "It can't be bypassed by cutting the wire, and when the alarm is forcibly disabled it will alert us through secondary channels."Learning Chinese? Our Elementary level at Popup Chinese is where things get a bit more complicated. By this level you should already know the basics and be able to parse simple sentences. This lets us start exploring more complicated grammar structures and more colloquial expressions that are harder to translate literally into English. But we still do this within the context of dialogues that showcase the sort of genuine mandarin you'll hear the next time you're trussed up in a home invasion waiting for the police to arrive.
Elementary - Consoling a Friend
Jul 04, 2012
Show notes
Providing emotional support isn't exactly our forte here at Popup Towers, and it probably isn't wrong to call our philosophy closer to the sink-or-swim variety. But when an esteemed listener wrote in requesting a lesson on how to console a distraught friend, we couldn't say no. So if you're curious how to handle yourself the next time a Chinese-speaking friend suffers a nervous breakdown, we have your back with this podcast. Because life will probably get better for them. Maybe.
Advanced - Undue Pressure
Jul 02, 2012
Show notes
If you're living or dating in China, it's impossible not to notice the enormous pressure Chinese society places on young people to get married as quickly as the laws of physics permit. Casual dating is somewhat of a foreign concept, so much so that women past the age of twenty-five often bemoan their spinster-like condition. And for men, the situation is equally bad, as the pressure to attract a wife creates attendant pressures to purchase a home, car and other material products which are effectively unaffordable for many workers.Learning Chinese? In this advanced and all-native Chinese podcast, Echo, Gao and Qin take to our studio to talk about their own experiences with marriage and their attempts to deal with the pressure. As we find out, one of the three is actually planning to get married quite soon, which provides more grist for the gossip mill. There is a lot of advanced vocabulary in this show, so if your Chinese is good enough to follow natural-speed conversation, join us and find out which of the three is staring down the marriage aisle.
Intermediate - Our Hong Kong Subsidiary
Jun 27, 2012
Show notes
While the financial meltdown ravaged Squire and Huddington's continental operations, the transnational's activities in Hong Kong remained surprisingly resilient to slumping European demand. Western analysts attributed the growth to continued demand-pull in Asia and management's hands-off attitude to letting its Hong Kong subsidiary refocus on the Asian market, and there may even be some truth to that....Learning Chinese? Our show today is about lies, gossip and rumors. If you're a Chinese learner at the intermediate level or above and feel comfortable listening to a show that is half in Chinese and half in English, join us for a bilingual discussion of the Chinese rumor mill. We'll cover some practical vocabulary for spreading malicious gossip yourselves, and take a quick look at some of the more outlandish rumors that have circulated on the Chinese Internet in recent years.
Elementary - Lost in the Forest
Jun 25, 2012
Show notes
Thirty years later the entire class would laugh about it over drinks, or most of them would anyway. For his part, Zhang Hua would simply get a far-away look in his eye whenever his mind travelled back to those five days he had spent huddled for shelter in a moss-covered hollow after his teacher and classmates had driven back to the city oblivious to the significance of the empty seat in the back of the bus.Learning Chinese? By now you've learned that Chinese people like to answer questions by repeating the verb used to ask them in either the affirmative or negative form. But did you know there are some situations in which this rule isn't quite so reliable? This podcast covers one of these cases, in which the common verb 是 is - much like Zhang Hua in our dialogue - strangely absent from its usual place.
Absolute Beginners - The Limits of Evolution
Jun 20, 2012
Show notes
We have had many dark moments at Popup Towers, but perhaps none darker than the summer of 2009 when Echo bought a cricket from a street peddler on Nanluoguxiang, and proudly placed "The Great General" by the window in his wicker cage. For the first few days as our guest settled into his new quarters, his timid nature made him an amiable office companion. This period of quietude was not to last, and while his death three months later was sad, it was not without its upside considering we run a recording facility.Learning Chinese? We've decided that this is a lesson perfect for Absolute Beginners to the Chinese language... or really Advanced students looking to brush up on their pronunciation of what we've decided is basically the hardest word in the entire Chinese language. If this is your first lesson you might be better off picking another one from our lesson archives, but if you're up for a challenge, take a listen and let us know what you think.
Intermediate - Crossing the Border
Jun 18, 2012
Show notes
After months setting up shell companies everywhere from Hong Kong to the Cayman Islands, Xiao Li's plans would still hinge on his single exit interview at the Shenzhen border. The mid-level manager had amassed enough paperwork from contacts outside the country to make his trip seem innocuous to superiors at the Foreign Ministry, but there was always the potential for things to get ugly at the border crossing....
Advanced - The Detective Welder, part II
Jun 13, 2012
Show notes
The murder had happened around noon, when Winter Reynolds III had met a thick length of steel piping in a restroom at the Federal Reserve. The bludgeoning to death of America's most reclusive financial magnate was heady stuff for a press starved of political gossip: given the number and influence of the tycoon's avowed public enemies, his killer could have been almost half of New York or Washington.And yet, Detective Stronach thought as he surveyed the crime scene, this mystery could be unraveled by the evidence in this room. For who could have wielded the weapon? Initial evidence pointed to the plumber who had been repairing the executive washroom upstairs. Who else could have had the opportunity to sneak the murder weapon into the building or the professional acumen to wield it with such destructive force. And yet something about this hypothesis was also unsettling to the detective. But why?
Intermediate - The State Bowling Champion
Jun 11, 2012
Show notes
In the weeks after the interns discovered John's status as State bowling champion, his ranking was all the gossip in the office. For despite the fact that none of his coworkers had ever expressed the slightest interest in his sport, John now found he could hardly head to the watercooler without one of the marketing crew attempting to give him a high-five, or an engineer rushing out to ask for tips on ball-handling. He would have been sure the entire spectacle was some elaborate setup if it weren't for everyone's apparent sincerity about the whole escapade.Learning Chinese? One of the things we try to do at our higher levels here at Popup Chinese is step away from just reviewing the literal meanings of various words and focus more on the ways that native Chinese speakers communicate more subtle emotions. And that's exactly our focus in this lesson, which talks about a common way to express reluctance that we've yet to see covered in any other textbook. So you see, it's not that we need to teach this, but shouldn't someone...?
Advanced - An Education for Life
Jun 06, 2012
Show notes
As Detective Stronach surveyed the ransacked vault, he felt time contract on itself, as if it were but yesterday he had first found work in the London shipyards, joining the local welding crew as its youngest and skinniest wharf rat. In those days he had learned the trades the hard way, clambering into tightest of crawlspaces and down the narrowest of industrial pipes to finish dangerous corner welds and affix steel plating to the hull. It had been difficult and claustrophobic work, but it had given him an education for life.
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