Popup Chinese

Gandhi said something about being the change you want to see, and we agree. Because while you may have purchased that bottle of orangeade, and even handed over good money for it, it was a transaction made under false pretenses. So go stand up for yourself. Head back to that newspaper stand and tell the owner what you think of his business. You can insist this is not good enough and demand satisfaction. Learning Chinese? We have more beginner lessons coming out later this week. In the meantime, our show for today is for the more wizened Intermediate crowd which already speaks some Chinese and is looking to sound even more native. And how are we going to help you with this but by teaching a number of colloquial but non-standard words you can use as drop-in replacements for high-frequency ones everyone already knows. So listen up and drop these words into conversation and in no time your friends will be looking at you with renewed respect and possibly even fear.

"So what you're saying is... you can't give awards for good journalism to bad journalism?" After a few upbeat weeks on political intrigue in Chongqing, Sinica is back this week with another depressing show about the various ways China is killing us all. This week our conversation turns to cadmium-laced rice, endangered species and the pollution of the food supply in a conversation with writer and broadcaster Isabel Hilton, founder of China Dialogue, and Jonathan Watts, Guardian correspondent and author of the book When A Billion Chinese Jump. As always, we hope you enjoy the show. If you like to keep up-to-date on things but have trouble tearing yourself off Facebook to check for a new show each Friday, one alternative is letting our podcasts come to you. Subscribe to our RSS feed by opening iTunes and selecting the option "Subscribe to Podcast" from the Advanced file menu. Provide the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica when prompted. And if you just want to download this specific show, you can grab the standalone mp3 file for this episode right here.

We're pretty lucky not to have had to deal with any major medical crises while in China. Which is probably a good thing judging by the contents of this Advanced podcast, which features a native-native Chinese conversation between Echo and Tiansen about the medical system and how it often puts doctors and patients at odds. So if you've already got pretty decent Chinese and are looking for listening practice that will help you pick up new words and phrases, give this podcast and shot and see how you do.

Suffering the mockery of his high school peers, Stephen had retreated into scholastics to escape from pain and loneliness. Eventually, this would lead him to graduate with top honors and be accepted by one of the most prestigious universities in the nation. And yet as he accepted his diploma, he wondered if one day he might return to this small town and show them all that with courage and determination, a man could still succeed.

In one of the juicier quotes making the rounds on social networks this week a private equity investor in Shanghai savaged the Chinese media for its unblinking corruption, quipping to the New York Times that "if one of my companies came up with a cure for cancer, I still couldn’t get any journalists to come to the press conference without promising them a huge envelope filled with cash.” Exactly how bad is this problem and were does it cross the line? This week Sinica dives into the question of how Chinese journalism works in practice with a show that splits cleanly along industry lines. Joining host Jeremy Goldkorn this week and representing the journalism and public relations industries in turn are Sinica friends Li Xin, managing editor of Caixin magazine, and Will Moss, China PR expert and blogger of Imagethief fame. Want more Sinica? We've just passed our second anniversary with the show, and have a ton of shows covering a huge range of topics in our by now fairly massive Sinica archive. And if listening online isn't your thing, why not try downloading them? To subscribe to the Sinica feed, just click on the Advanced file menu in iTunes and select the option "Subscribe to Podcast". Provide the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica when prompted, and your computer will take care of the rest. If you want to download this show as a standalone mp3 file.

In the spirit of sharing a helpful tip for dealing with friends who procreate, one thing we've learned something of the hard way is the astonishing degree to which parents end up being more patient with their new offspring than they are with their non-childbearing but emotionally supportive friends, especially should one happen to make a stray remark about asking the little guy to hurry up because other people might need to go too. Just starting to learn Chinese? Our podcast for today is one of our more difficult lessons at the Absolute Beginner level, since it presumes you've already run into the particle 了, and know it is used to put sentences into the past tense and signal what is known as a "change of state". But what you might not know is that sometimes you'll see this doubled-up in the same sentence. This lesson is about one case when this occurs, so that you can impress everyone with how native your Chinese is getting.

I know you were doing email long before I signed up for the yahoo, but could anyone really have imagined what the Internet would have become when AOL invented it in 1993? I mean... just look at this beautiful scarf I bought to celebrate our Easter gift-giving tradition. It might seem like an ordinary piece of clothing at first, but if you look carefully you'll see it's hand-made. And I had to get it shipped in overnight from a store that specializes in one-of-a-kind pieces, so don't get it wet. Learning Chinese? Today we celebrate Easter by combining the power of coverbs with the fun of collocations. The result is a set of powerful and fun ways to talk about your feelings towards people and objects. And there's no need for thanks. Just consider it a Merry Easter present from all of us at Popup Towers to you. Seriously though, be careful about getting this one wet, since it's more of an indoor scarf than all-weather gear.

Heard the bad news? Word on the street is that Fat Package passed away in a Suzhou bar last month. We never really moved in the same circles as the guy, but if true we'll miss his presence in town. Even while we were hustling to make ends meet downtown, it was somehow comforting to know Fat was enjoying the Shunyi lifestyle. And with his place just a quick heiche from the Lido hotel who could be faulted for wondering what it might take for them to get a taste of the expat lifestyle too? Curious where your "fat expat package" has gone? This week on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn welcome Will Moss of Imagethief and David Wolf of Wolf Group Asia for a dissection of the expat job market: what sort of jobs are available in China these days and what it takes to get on what we lovingly call the FEP. We put everything on the table this week, including some numbers that will either impress or horrify you. And for good measure, we also look at Sina Weibo's slap-on-the-wrist for its involvement spreading coup rumors two weeks ago, a retaliatory strike that turned China's biggest social network into a marginally better version of Twitter for a horrifying three days. Trying to keep up-to-date on China? Sinica is a regular podcast covering the lastest chit worth chatting about on the China scene. If you like the show, remember that you can subscribe manually in iTunes by selecting "Subscribe to Podcast" from your "Advanced" file menu and providing the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica when prompted. We also encourage listeners to download this episode as a standalone mp3 file directly from our site.

By now we assume you've heard of pinyin: the dominant method of writing the sound of Chinese characters using the roman alphabet. We use pinyin everywhere on Popup Chinese and while we obviously can't teach you all of the sounds in a single podcast, we did want to put something together for those of you having trouble making sense of the system, and in particular to clear up three common misconceptions people have about the romanization system: the mistaken idea that pronunciation follows English norms, the belief that the sounds in pinyin are internally consistent, and the confusion that strikes when it comes time to use pinyin to enter characters on a computer. Beyond this podcast, we also want to take a minute and point out two resources here on Popup Chinese that most beginners overlook. The first is our online pinyin chart which is now bundled with our Chinese dictionary. You can use this to explore all possible pinyin sounds, see the relationship between different sounds, and hear the pronunciation of all sounds quickly and easily. Our second resource is our archive of pinyin recordings available for free download. They might not make for as easy listening as a podcast, but they're useful and you're welcome to use them with our compliments.

Today we are pleased but mystified to present another edition of Popup Total Request Live, this time with an advanced show directed at the astonishingly large number of you (N > 1) who have written in to request a Chinese-only discussion on dental hygiene. Facing the incredulity of the rest of the office, Echo tried to explain your enthusiasm to us as follows. "It's because everyone loves the dentist," she said. "It's like a holiday when you take a day off work to go to get your teeth cleaned or have oral surgery." So if you enjoy this podcast you should write echo@popupchinese.com to express your gratitude for her tireless efforts to bring this show to reality. The rest of us disavow any responsibility for it and are working hard to produce more family-friendly shows -- like the upcoming sequel to our plunger episode.

Long-time listeners may be hard-pressed to forget our first foray into the exciting world of home plumbing, and if you're new to Popup Chinese you may want to listen to that show before exposing yourself to today's sequel, which picks where the last one left off. Our two protagonists now return home after a hearty lunch and turn their attention to the question we have left hanging all these three years: where did the plunger go anyway? Learning Chinese? We're not sure if this lesson is a step up or a step down from its predecessor, which we've been told by multiple people has the distinction of being the most highbrow, lowbrow Chinese podcast in existence. In any event, we're certain you won't find the sort of thing we teach today in most or any textbooks, which is a pity since it is actually quite useful. In addition to covering some useful vocab for home cleaning, we also provide a useful reminder of why you should never let friends over to your house.

With fears inflated by a few carefully placed rumors, the local populace was wise enough to stay away from the dig site, rightly fearing what might surface in a place which had lain buried for so long in the sands outside Cairo. And yet this same caution did not apply to the members of the excavation team, of whom no-one could predict which way their loyalties would bend once the tomb was opened and its treasures revealed once more to a waiting world. Learning Chinese? Our Intermediate lesson for today features a dialogue straight out of an Indiana Jones archeological adventure. And as is fitting for such a topic, we spend a bit of time in this podcast stretching beyond simple language learning and look instead at the subtle and often collaborative process through which Chinese screenplays turn into Chinese films.

The world's cultural heritage had been incinerated along with its servers when the first bombs fell, and what little film stock survived had decayed in the years that followed as human society struggled to rebuild itself after the apocalypse. And yet here (here!) in this musty storehouse in Tibet, Xiao Wang had somehow stumbled across an astonishingly large collection of twentieth century cultural artifacts. Would it be enough to piece the past back into existence, and rediscover the fabled Thunderdome of yore? This week on Popup Chinese, Echo, Gao and Tiansen conduct an exercise in cultural anthropology, attempting to piece together the plot of the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome from nothing more than the music video for Tina Turner's classic rock anthem "We Don't Need Another Hero". What is the film about? Why the excessive human hair? And how on earth does one say Thunderdome in Chinese anyway? For answers to these questions and more, check out today's show and let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Stephen looked at his cab driver with newfound respect. Although traffic on the second ring road was otherwise touch-and-go, here at last was a man attempting to change it. Hunched over the steering wheel with his eyes on the road, the driver pushed forward at a slow but steady pace, sometimes lagging behind and sometimes nearly hitting the vehicle in front but never actually stopping. It was traffic smoothing applied as expertly as Stephen had ever seen done, as if this one man were trying to wrest Beijing congestion into shape through force of will alone. Learning Chinese? Even if you don't speak any Chinese, this lesson should be at your level of difficulty. What we'll learn is how to double-up a number of high-frequency verbs in order to make suggestions. There's a simple trick here that's impossible to forget once you've learned it and using it will help you sound a lot more fluent than people who are learning from regular textbooks. So if you're working towards learning Chinese take a listen and see what you think. And if you have any questions, let us know in the discussion section below.

If you smell anything burning, it's likely your Internet cable melting from the heat of all these rumors. Which is why at Sinica we turn our unforgiving gaze this week at unsubstantiated press foreign and domestic, focusing first on reports of heightened police security in Beijing, midnight tank appearances, gunshots near the square, luxury car crashes, and even whispers of a coup d'etat. And more internationally, we can't help but discuss This American Life's recent retraction of a China-related story that was heavily fabricated: L'affaire Daisey. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn, Sinica is proud to have Rob Schmitz on the show this week. Rob is of course the China correspondent for Marketplace who put two and two together and whose basic fact checking caught out a number of lies and inconsistencies in the Mike Daisey monologue as covered by a slew of major American news outlets. Joining us for the dissection of what happened here are two other China experts: Mary Kay Magistad of Public Radio International's The World and Tania Branigan of the Guardian, also known as the other founding member of Beijing's new Azure-Winged Magpie Appreciation Society. Two quick notes before we get to the discussion. First is a reminder that you can subscribe to Sinica through iTunes using our RSS feed at http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica. Facebook users should also be happy to know we now have a new way to keep yourself up-to-date on Sinica - check out our group page at: http://www.facebook.com/sinicapodcast. And as always, a final reminder that if you don't want to listen to our show online, you're always welcome to download it directly from the site as a standalone mp3 file.