For most of the evening, Jay had hovered on the cusp of sleep, kept awake by the muted sounds of bossa nova pouring from his flatmate's stereo, its dim beats peppered with the occasional rattling of pipes and a series of strange falsetto screams. And on the few occasions he managed to drift off, his mind was flooded with strange images of his thesis committee at a Cuban beach party, reading his thesis and laughing at it in a series of oddly-familiar falsetto screams.

Our latest show is an elementary Chinese lesson. For us the elementary level means that you're able to follow the basics in spoken Chinese, but have difficulty watching television or listening to the radio at normal speed without assistance. This is the level where we like to highlight the basic grammar points we assume everyone knows at our higher levels, where our focus shifts to how and why Chinese people break them. So if you're an elementary Chinese student get started by listening to this show, and then check out our chinese lesson archive for more than a thousand other great shows.