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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.

The Indiana Jones of China

After his controversial involvement with the Tarim mummy excavations in Western Xinjiang, Victor Mair might just be the closest thing Sinology has to Indiana Jones, assuming the fictional Spielberg character was a renowned linguist, translator and popular blogger in addition to his standing as a historian/archeologist. So it can be no surprise that we're delighted to be joined by Victor today for a discussion that delves from the origins of well-known Buddhist texts to digressions on ancient migration patterns, and even a bit of myth-clearing on Chinese romanization.

Posted Fri, 2012-05-25 01:00

The Interminable Wait

At forty-five minutes past the hour Mark was visibly restless, and by a quarter past he was positively pacing. It didn't matter to him that this was a sensitive legal affair involving three major parties across two continents. Considering that Hawkins-Billet was extending its services pro bono - hardly an inexpensive favor - surely it wasn't too much to expect punctuality from the client?

Posted Wed, 2012-05-23 01:00

The Anti-Foreign Crackdown

If you've been following the news, you'll know our title for this show refers to the latest "official crackdown" going on in Beijing: this time aimed at the apparent flood of itinerant foreigners in China to steal money, jobs and women from Yang Rui at CCTV. In unrelated news, if you want to buy some drugs, you can apparently still pick them up at Sanlitun.

Posted Mon, 2012-05-21 17:05

Stirring up the South China Sea

This week on Sinica, as the situation in the South China Seas simmers and Chinese society turns noticeably xenophobic, we're pleased to be joined by Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt from the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization which has just released a fantastic report on the actors and factors in Chinese policymaking that are contributing to increased tensions in the South China Sea. In contrast with much of the writing on this issue which assumes that China is a unitary actor, this report reveals a more complex picture of competing government agencies. Don’t miss this episode if you're curious about what is really happening in the South China Sea and why.

Posted Fri, 2012-05-18 01:00

Occupational Hazard

Flying into Los Angeles at night was like falling into the stars themselves. Below the plane, the darkened sprawl stretched to the ends of the horizon, the streets bathed in a hundred thousand glimmering lights, flashing and twinkling as the cars on the expressway churned their way home. And welcoming them all was the LAX airport in the distance, its runways framed by strobing lights....

Posted Wed, 2012-05-16 01:00