come on, it's red chamber. Sinology 101.

I am a loyal danwei reader and have been for years. I am really really disappointed that you have teamed up with this website. It is shameless bite off of chinesepod, too bad its not in the states and chinesepod could sue their asses in court. "大家好我是 Echo" yea right I think you mean Jenny!!!!!

g dubs:

Thanks for your comment.

You know, I was slightly annoyed when ESWN, China Digital Times and Shanghaiist and a bunch of other websites showed up on the China blog scene in 2004, 2005 and 2006, stamping on Danwei's turf at least a year after we were online and doing our own thing.

But that's the thing about the Internet: there's no value in an idea, or in the format of a media product. There's only value in the execution.

And the existence of these sites is a good thing: it means there is much more information of the kind I consider important, and undersupplied, free on the Internet.

Furthermore, having a female host for an audio show first became popular on the radio in the United States in the 1920s. It's hardly an original idea.

What I like about Popup Chinese is the popup annotation function and some of the other technical and linguistic tools they offer.

ChinesePod seems to be a good service, and I know many Danwei enjoy their podcasts and lessons. I wish them luck too. But Popup Chinese has a better model for sharing revenue with a site like Danwei.

Jeremy your point is well taken. Danwei was the first and remains the best, but others with your format have things to contribute to the body of knowledge. Chinesepod does have that feature as well, and the "welcome to" intro is exactly a copy down to the music. I shouldn't be a hater of people trying to help folks with CSL, it just struck me that the format was so smiler. Good luck to them as well, maybe if their product really improves I will be recommending their service one day. Keep up the good work man.

g dub,

We're sorry you don't like the service. Perhaps you can give us another try in six months to a year?

I did want to comment on the suggestion we are somehow a derivative business, since this is not true. Ideas do matter. As does leadership and execution. We have been producing and releasing free Chinese learning materials since before the word podcasting came into currency and provide data and software used widely by the learning community as a whole, including the commercial podcasting community in Shanghai.

Our focus with Popup Chinese is on providing comprehensive learning materials for people who want more than conversational Chinese, and who have a preference for the standard northern dialect for whatever reason. We are working to make this as affordable as possible: for less than the cost of a good paper dictionary we provide a content-rich environment that eliminates the need for traditional reference tools and keeps people motivated, along with online support from a really high quality team (I consider us very lucky to have such a great team).

If you have any questions about our work or our pedagogical approach, you're welcome to raise them on the site itself. We try to be very open about what we are trying to accomplish and welcome this sort of discussion.

i like the chinesepod ad displaying above