你……好，你…是…哪个…国家…的…人？你…喜欢…吃…中国菜…吗？你…会…用…筷子…吗？

Nice to know I'm not the only one :-D

@AmateurAsian,

The RSS feeds update periodically (things are run by a cron job) so it's possible there will be times when a new lesson is on the site but still not pushed to people's RSS feeds. This shouldn't last for more than a couple of hours though.

I've just checked your feed manually and can confirm that this lesson is showing up in it (top of the list). Are you still having trouble downloading it through iTunes?

Best,

--david

With the 321 Chinese app, I also did not see this lesson in the RSS feed in the morning. But it appeared pretty soon in the afternoon.

My challenge with this lesson is that I cannot understand large amounts of the important parts of the key learning as they are delivered mostly in Chinese.

This one seems much more difficult elementary lesson than the other two I have been studying. I actually first thought that I have accidentally downloaded an intermediate lesson.

@LumiPanda爸,

There's always a spectrum of difficulty. I think this one is sort of on the edge as far as the length and difficulty of the dialogue goes. We ended up going with elementary largely because the vocab and subject matter (introduction) are going to be too familiar for people at the intermediate level.

On the language front, at the elementary level we try to have Echo or Sylvia speak in Chinese where possible. We just try to make sure that any key concepts discussed in mandarin are also covered in english at some point, so that even someone who misses most of what is discussed in Chinese will not be completely lost. So with that said, what did you find particularly confusing? The main point is that 上 means essentially the same thing as 起来 when used as a verb complement, and that you can - surprisingly - use the former even in situations where it would otherwise seem absurd, as with 下上雨 ("to start to rain").

@ Echo: 在家的两只猫都是灰色的，可是一只有好几隐约的斑纹。因为最近下大雪，他们在沙发上保持暖和就睡觉。很可爱，很偷懒。

@LumiPanda爸,

Awww, 谢谢，我很高兴 :)

@new_rizzo,

他们听起来真可爱！

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

...and in such well pronounced Mandarin....