Stop Playing with My Phone

There are moments of frustration in learning Chinese. Like the time you were crossing customs and the border agent asked for your Nexus One and refused to give it back. Or to be fair, he said he was looking for one and a more accurate description might be "played with it for about five minutes," all to the point you would have suspected industrial espionage if three of those minutes weren't spent on Snake.

Our own bad experiences aside, our lesson today is designed for all of you who have yet to learn a single word of Chinese. The is one of the easiest lessons you'll find on Popup Chinese. In it, we introduce a very simple dialogue that will have you saying "this one" and "that one" and then asking others to give you things. Whether you're demanding electronics back from overzealous state employees, picking food off a menu or sourcing high-end commodity electronics from bazaars in Shenzhen, this is Chinese you can use right away. So dig in!