Beautiful and Mysterious

Brad's heart was a wreck. The previous evening he had met a girl he could only describe as perfect. And she had seemed interested between their drinks and dancing. Yet when the party drew to a close, she simply smiled when he asked for a telephone number or email address and told him to look her up. But as best he could tell from a cursory search of the Internet, she was entirely off the grid as well. What was a man to do? Hunt through the city of Beijing door-by-door in search of a single girl?

Our Nearsighted Colleague

Need to express surprise or issue forceful denials? These are two things we find ourselves doing with alarming regularity when escorting a certain nearsighted colleague of ours around Beijing. But while this lesson is inspired by real life, it's fairly easy and is crammed full of useful expressions for anyone starting to learn Chinese. So if you're just starting to use Popup Chinese, listen in and let us know what you think.

A Simple Transaction

The Chinese teaching establishment had cornered us in a bar at Houhai, and was telling us it couldn't be done over shots of tequila. "Who can teach coverbs to absolute beginners," they scoffed. "You want to start with a lesson on drinking tea." The head of the Confucius Institute was nearly falling off his chair, but still chipped in something about the Great Wall. It was less a suggestion than something more forceful. "Play up the culture and make China look good, you know?"

And so we nodded and finished our drinks before heading home. "And down the hatches," Brendan said heading into the studio. "If we're going out in a blaze of glory, at least it'll be a blaze of linguistic glory that illustrates the topic-oriented nature of the Chinese language when it comes to giving instructions." The rest of us nodded. The world could drink tea on its own time. In our corner of the Internet, there was an urgent need for more podcasts about coverbs and topic-oriented sentences. The Great Wall could wait.

Handling the Cops

While everyone starts with the what-a-lovely-uniform-you-have-officer, we find that cheerful nodding gets harder to stomach once you've been fined once too often for miscellaneous visa paperwork, or after friends or family have been dragged to local precincts to answer for their non-existing connections with international Zionist conspiracies that may or may not threaten the Chinese salt supply. Which is not to say that we're bitter. But there's a point where the entire security theater starts feeling old.

So while we can't honestly recommend this way of dealing with the cops, if they happen to drop by on an early Saturday morning when you're still in bed nursing a hangover, there's absolutely nothing wrong with putting that pillow over your head and going back to sleep. If they think it's important they'll come back, and probably in about 24 hours with someone louder.

Ordering Pizza

If you ask most foreigners for random trivia about Tianjin, they'll probably mention the foreign concessions, or Herbert Hoover fighting in the streets during the Boxer Rebellion, or the pivotal role the city played in the student protests during the May Fourth Movement. What you won't hear is anyone rave about the pizza....

So let's note that if you've stumbled into Tianjin and are looking for a nice place to have lunch, this lesson is going to be totally useless to you unless you've "gone native" and have a thing for fruit and pak-choi smothered in a loving serving of ketchup and served up on toast. We give the city full points for trying, but you should probably hold off on practicing this vocab until you're in either Beijing or Shanghai, where it will come in really useful.