Let us skip the tale of Pirate Jack's flight from the gallows, noting only that the implausibility of his escape continues to fuel speculation that the world's most feared brigand did indeed die on the hangman's noose that day. And yet how to explain what happened years later: the discovery of the world's most fearsome pirate and scourge of the China seas employed as a common bank teller in the backwaters of the Caribbean....Learning Chinese? We're willing to admit that our Chinese lessons are sometimes a bit unorthodox. But if you've been plugging away at Chinese for a while, we think you'll find our lack of please-sit-down-and-have-another-cup-of-tea a breath of fresh air. So join us for the greatest pirate story ever told, and write us with suggestions for what comes next at ideas@popupchinese.com.
Echo
said on January 15, 2011
I have to say this lesson has everything I love -- pirate, zombie and bank teller. Adding plants will make it even better though. Ha ha.
Hope you guys enjoy it too. 希望大家都喜欢 :)
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
Tristan
said on January 15, 2011
Everyone loves pirates and zombies..that's a given...but I also love the emotionally disturbing lessons..like, "The orphanage", "the gay vampire", "the family secret" and "chinese love in a time of war".
I fully support Popup Chinese's quest for weirdness, but please don't forget to be weird emotionally too.
I vote for a lesson about a gay, orphaned pirate with a troubled family past, doing some soul-searching during wartime....Just a thought.
nurflight9
said on January 16, 2011
But please also don't forget other perhaps less weird souls who may love Popup Chinese with equal devotion, but for other reasons and who may really enjoy the great acting, the unorthodox in such lessons as the drunk dog, the Bank Heist, the ATM machine,the Broadway Musical advertisement, the window cleaning job interview, and even Chinese love in a time of war, etc but who really don't get a kick out of emotionally sick and disturbing. To be truthful, the really sick, low-life lessons, that drag you into lurid details of the violent sex life of gay vampires, incest, middle-aged women's sexual affairs with their son's friends, are useless to me because I can't stomach going back to them. This is frustrating because I depend on Pop-up Chinese to supply me with something new to chew on, and in such cases I have to wait even longer until another lesson on my level pops up. When this happens, it drives me back to the internet in search of other learning options to fill the void. I suspect that even if you were to cut out the really sick, low-life podcasts, you wouldn't lose customers because the rest have enough "weird-appeal" great humor and great acting to still satisfy everyone sufficiently.
trevelyan
said on January 16, 2011
@susanjallen,I think my favorite from the past year was probably Broadway Musicals, because Patrick did a fantastic job capturing the very matter-of-fact way that so much ends up getting translated into Chinese.> the really sick, low-life lessons, that drag you into lurid details of the violent sex life of gay vampires, incest....Wow this makes us sound depraved.... Just in defense, while our standards may be stranger, we do have them and I don't think we've ever actually had a podcast that is graphically violent or incestuous. In defense of the dialogue where the mother is hitting on her son's friend (she just shows him the house!), what I like is the contrast between the friend's near-inarticulate 你真美 and the mother's charmed but totally insensible 你可真会说话！
ch0ula09
said on January 17, 2011
I greatly enjoy the lessons, yet don't fancy myself as being sick or emotionally disturbed. In any case, I have heard the hosts issue requests for new and different material from the listeners. So I'm sure they could make even more fantastic episodes out of suggestions that don't upset various sensibilities.
rizzo
said on January 18, 2011
Best way to get onboard the good ship Demented is to work at getting desensitized to the bizarre and deliciously offensive. The vast open sewer that is popular culture nowadays should have blunted most persons' sensitivity. For those who somehow escaped their upbringing unscathed, I say keep on listening and before you know it - seems almost normal.
My vote is to keep the mental institution on speed dial and continue churning out the unique product that is 泡泡中文
huyilin
said on January 18, 2011
@rizzo
说得好！！:-)
nurflight9
said on January 18, 2011
Yeah, guess I was a bit over-graphic myself (!), but I really wasn’t implying that whoever can enjoy those lessons in question is emotionally disturbed or low-life. I think Rizzo hit the nail on the head—it’s rather a matter of desensitization. I’ve spent most of my life outside of the States, mostly in Third World countries, and even in China, I don’t live in a big city where I am assaulted with such stuff. But that said, I would say that probably 80%, of the world’s population is still left relatively unscathed (as Rizzo so aptly put it). The seamy side of American pop culture is perhaps the last thing I’d choose to immerse myself in or export.
Now this doesn’t really relate to the above, because Pop-up Chinese doesn’t exactly influence the world’s populations “:^)…, but I’ve been reflecting about this for some time, and sometimes I feel like an alien looking in…what’s different perhaps from the culture of a villager in Africa, India or Central Asia (or even the vast urban populations of just normal run of the mill people in such places) is not just the seamy stuff of pop culture, but an attitude which seems to accompany it, which breeds self-satisfaction and pride as to what’s cool and what isn’t and who’s cool and who isn’t, which is just as unfortunate as any prejudice (like class, which is still the predominate prejudice) that separates people and prevents them from deriving insight, perspective, knowledge and just simple pleasure of appreciating and taking joy in the company of a wider selection of the world’s population.
Anyway, the real long and short of this, which applies to Pop-up Chinese interests, is who your target audience is and what does or doesn’t attract them. I could well be in the minority here and maybe the only one who takes offense. It’s just that when I read that plea for the more emotionally disturbing, I panicked and rushed to put in my two cents worth! (In the case of the mother hitting on the son’s friend, I think it was as much the casual reference to the father’s death that put it over the top for me.)
godeak
said on July 28, 2011
disagree. susanjallen, no one's forcing you to listen to all the lessons. if you have such a delicate constitution, you can click listen to other lesson, and avoid those swooning fainting spells brought on by, say, rough language and PG movies. but please allow those of us who have a sense of humor to enjoy lessons that are not incredibly boring. PUC folks: bring on the dark stuff. the more twisted, goofy, and bizarre, the better! it is easy to work in useful vocabulary, phrases, idioms, and cultural knowledge into a lesson on, say, getting mugged by syphilis-maddened grannies on your way back from the midnight Rocky Horror showing. (yes, writers, you can use that idea. you're welcome.) BTW, don't you think your chinese acquaintances want to talk about stuff other than "where's the bank?" and "i would like two first-class tickets to beijing?" Just like in any other country, if you don't want to be incredibly boring (though perhaps that's not important to you) you gotta be able to talk about stuff like, i dunno, pirates or venereal diseases or violent movies or hook-ups or whatever. you'll learn more chinese if people can stand to have you around for a few qingdaos or karaoke or a leisurely huoguo.
Xiao Hu
said on July 28, 2011
@Godeak,Emphatically disagree.I'm a fan of crazy, strange humor and yet, I agree with Susanjallen. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to keep it clean. Clean can still be creative and fun without having to be risque'. Small minded sorts are those that rely on an outlandish, offensive or morbid hook in order to feel creatively satisfied instead of relying on true creativity, which is why I go to so few movies these days.I'd like to know which Chinese people you were speaking of, because they most certainly aren't the sort that I run with. My co-workergot offended at one of the african american foreign teachers in my school who said, "尿尿" in a flippant manor, to which she replied, "Okay, that's gross"!
pefferie
said on July 28, 2011
I love the site the way it is. It is all too easy to play it safe and never offend anybody, but it is not fun. Popup Chinese podcasts reflect the personalities of their creators who _are_ having fun, and that fun is contagious. Let them do what they do, they do it so well! All of us have podcasts we don't like; this is just a fact of life. But most of them are brilliant, and that's what matters at the end of the day.
godeak
said on July 29, 2011
xiao hu, I think that one take-home from this exchange is that you will find prudish people anywhere in the world. Obviously there are cultural differences: my impression is that Americans are on average less prudish about sex, but Chinese are less prudish about bodily function. (Not a scientific claim, and certainly an overgeneralization, but that's one person's impression.) So your co-worker's response to niaoniao is a bit surprising to me, but as I said, there are prudes everywhere. To clarify: you do not NEED scatalogical humor or morbidity to be interesting or funny; some of the funniest movies are the most subtle, and too much gross-out in comedy is often a cover-up for lack of clever ideas. HOWEVER: we are all trying to learn Chinese, right? We are not ready (well, I won't speak for you, but *I'm* not) to understand the kind of clever subtlety of, say, the opening scene of The Social Network, if it were in Mandarin. I am still trying to go beyond the most basic words about banking, for example. But that is a very boring subject to me, and perhaps to many people. Zombies, pirates, etc. keep it engaging. Humor and surprise are great factor to engage attention and facilitate learning. Incidentally, I have yet to hear any podcast that can hold a candle to the daily news for disturbing, shocking, gross, dark content. I'm just saying, so when you and susanjellen venture out of your safe rooms, you won't accidentally see a news feed and end up weeping wild-eyed and incoherent in fetal position. But kudos on calling me out on the low-life Chinese I hang out with. The faculty and grad students at Key Laboratories in China are surely a bunch of ignorant, churlish clods. Because they want to talk about more than 3 superficial topics gleaned from intro language lessons. My suggestion to the PUC folks: label lessons as "G" or "PG". Then you can let slavering, childish clods like me choose *our* lessons, and those with more delicate sensibilities, who are gloriously removed from dirt, strong emotions, and all bad things on the earth, choose whatever lessons their sensibilities can handle. (Victorian knick-knacks? Finger-sandwich repartee?) ;) Either way, keep it fun, funny and weird!
Xiao Hu
said on July 30, 2011
@Godeak, I think your views about education are right on the money! I've always been an advocate of using humor as a way of fascilitating the learning process. I think the reason that Popup decided to fuse a boring subject with scatalogical humor was, in order to help us remember words like 开户, 最低余额 and 利息, by surrounding them with an offbeat, humorous context, it can enable the words to be entered into the long-term memory us we, the learners. Which is an absolutely correct way to help us remember new words. The Chinese have a saying, 有得必有失, which literally translates to, to have gain (one) must (also) have loss. What esoteric dialogues lack is a reallistic context. If I were to soley use this dialogue and then go to the local Chinese bank to 开个户, beyond 开个户, I wouldn't get very far. The dry, boring, lifeless dialogues do have one advantage, which is that they are lifelike. I can take every word of a dialogue in something like a, Practical Chinese Reader for example and use it in a true banking situation. I can't however, take our Zombie Pirate Captain dialogue and apply it directly to real life. Even, 最低你要存五百块 doesn't apply, because a 最低余额 is not required by ANY bank in China for ANY day to day account, so asking about or talking about a minimum balance is a bit of a moot point in China, unless we're opening an account at a foreign investment bank. What I've outlined above, I believe is when looking into the subtext of Susanjallen's message is most likely the catalyst of her frustration. Beyond that, I recall in the comments of the lesson about the middle aged woman hitting on her son's friends, there was a man who remarked he thought the dialogue was kind of disturbing due to the line, "Where is your husband?", "Oh, he's DEAD!" Perhaps this was an exhibition of prudish behavior, I'm not sure. By and large the dialogues are EXTREMELY clever. This is another aspect that greatly aids the educational process. If Popup were filled to the brim with surly materials, I wouldn't be a member here. I must reiterate that I'm a Popup Chinese ADDICT, one reason is their approach to education. There's nothing wrong with wanting to have fun while learning. I believe that the majority of people can't learn successfuly without a sense of fun. What I am saying is that Susanjallen's comments are not unreasonable. Perhaps Popup MAY want to adopt a ratings system, or at least a warning that some lessons have more adult concepts in them. However, we are all adults here, I'm not certain there's any reason to go that far.
crusty_138
said on August 1, 2011
Funnily enough, I've just been reading about Episodic memory an how it can be a useful tool in learning - particularly in areas of Maths & Language. The theory being that memory of an event, or something else that you experience at the time of learning something helps trigger the thing learned. In this regard I find Popup Chinese's "twisted" sense of humour very useful as a learning tool - esp has I too love all things Zombie related. Take for example the lesson on International Zombie school:- While I doubt (I think) I'll ever need to use the phrase "Our Zombies meet International Standards" the association with Zombies has triggered some useful vocab & a very useful grammar pattern (eg ....达到。。。。标准）I also know from this association, that if I need to refresh my memory on such things as reach/attain/comply etc, I remember which particular podcast I need to re-visitI say more Zombies, Pirates and filthy cooks who sneeze all over the restaurants chopsticks!!!!
pefferie
said on August 1, 2011
@Xiao Hu - this is the exact conclusion I came to the day before yesterday when trying to buy a return ticket to Suzhou - I didn't even know how to say "return ticket"! Popup Chinese covers a broad range of everyday subjects, but leaves gaps in all of them. I am looking for supplemental materials (phrasebooks and similar) to try and close them.I did succeed in buying my tickets, but to be entirely honest, I was helped by a fellow fellow bilingual customer. I did not even know the word for passport...很丢人
Xiao Hu
said on August 3, 2011
@pefferie, I've been through the same 丢人的 experience, although perhaps not with 往返票 or 护照, but with other seemingly mundane items. Even though I'm at a more advanced level than you, I still run into problems that I feel I shouldn't run into given the amount of time and work I've put into this 大业. It looks like I'll be a member of Popup Chinese for at least a bit longer. I'm hoping that the unlimited speaking practice thing will start sometime soon, maybe that can give me a leg up on some of the issues that have been plaguing me for the past umpteen years.
