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PopupChinese.com: Popup Chinese Language Show w/Free Mandarin Lessons (Audio MP3), Free Online Tools and a Hip Team in Beijing!

Summary

Hailing from Beijing, Popup Chinese offers refreshing, high-quality audio podcast lessons for Mandarin Chinese learners: free! Carefully planned and well-recorded, these lessons are professional, useful and fun. The Popup Chinese team is young, vibrant and eager to guide Chinese learners to true fluency in the language.

Popup Chinese is truly one of the most exciting language podcast resources to hit the scene for any language! In addition to offering free audio lessons for listening and download, they also provide a host of amazinly powerful free software tools including a user-editable English-Chinese-Pinyin dictionary, an excellent Chinese text annotator, a steady flow of annotated news in Mandarin Chinese and a Firefox English-Chinese-Pinyin dictionary plugin. And for those serious about speaking Chinese, a reasonable paid upgrade that includes lesson transcripts, supplemental exercises, a personalized vocabulary training software tool and access to a vibrant user community.

All in all, the Popup Chinese team and user community are incredibly dedicated and helpful! Get started (or keep learning!) now by immersing yourself with this talented, friendly and active Mandarin Chinese learning website: Popup Chinese

From Website

An Institution in Chinese Learning...

Popup Chinese dates back to 2001, when work on our Chinese learning technology began at the University of California, Berkeley. Our service developed rapidly during the SARS crisis in 2003 with the first web-based edition of our distinctive popup annotator going online later that year, hosted from a budget server based in Beijing.

Over the next few years, our learning systems attracted a following among bilingual translators. We began to release data for use by the open source community, and eventually run ancilliary reference services including NewsinChinese, and the Adso Textbook project. By late 2006 our textbook portal was garnering rave reviews as the premiere site for students with a serious interest in advanced mandarin acquisition.

Popup Chinese is our latest step forward, and an effort to bring the same excellence in language acquisition to students at earlier stages in the learning process. From our hutong in downtown Beijing, we produce materials that give foreign speakers the confidence to engage with China in mandarin: the language of the 21st century.

We encourage you to subscribe to the site and accelerate your learning. In addition to our basic subscriptions, we're delighted to offer custom learning packages to individuals and companies with unique training needs.

Visit Popup Chinese.

Running Dogs and Locusts

Ongoing tension between Hong Kong and mainland citizens erupted into open flames on February 1 when a Hong Kong group raised more than HKD 100,000 to publish a full-page anti-China advertisement in the Apple Daily comparing mainlanders to parasitic locusts and calling for curtailment of benefits enjoyed by Chinese visitors to the Special Administrative Region. The ad was the latest move in an increasingly acrimonious spat that shows no sign of letting up.

Posted Fri, 2012-02-03 01:00

The Beijing Accent and Standard Mandarin

It's probably the biggest source of misinformation out there about the Chinese language, so today Echo and David take to our studio to chat about what exactly constitutes the difference between standard mandarin and the Beijing dialect. If you're totally new to Chinese, you can use this show to practice some key words in a way that will help you come across like a native speaker. And if you're a more advanced beginner, we also have some real Beijing slang in here we encourage you to throw into conversation to bewilder and amaze your landlords, friends and neighbors.

Posted Wed, 2012-02-01 01:00

Epilogue to A Scanner Darkly

Today we take a break from showcasing Chinese literature to feature the epilogue from the Chinese translation of Philip K. Dick's well-known short novel, A Scanner Darkly. As fans of PKD, we found the full translations to a number of his books buried in the foreign literature section of the Xinhua bookstore at Xidan and thought it might be worthwhile highlighting a passage as an example of a fairly straightforward English to Chinese translation.

Posted Sun, 2012-01-29 01:00

A Matter of Food Security

It felt as though the household was passing through some horrible wartime rationing. Once a daily luxury, the mid-afternoon milking had become at first irregular before fading to an almost complete absence. Conferring on the crisis from the comfort of the third floor sun deck, Edmund and Susan decided that the time had passed for inaction. If they were not to live at the mercy of others for their basic food security, it would be necessary to root out their own reserves, however problematic that might be without opposable thumbs.

Posted Wed, 2012-01-25 01:00

A Perversion of Justice

It had been particularly dark that evening, which lent some credence to the claims of the parking lot attendants not to have seen the actual killing. But while the evidence against the main suspect was admittedly circumstantial, the drive to secure a conviction was shared at all levels of government, with it being quite clear to those in power that whoever killed Andrei Prodan had not only an uncommon viciousness, but a fundamental disregard for the institutions of public governance itself.

Posted Mon, 2012-01-23 01:00