About

One of the things we're proud of at Popup Towers is our hard-fought ability to wring natural dialogues

out of less-than-natural voice-actors, a skill that usually involves unleashing Grace at them in varying

degrees of rage. And since recording a dialogue this way can take up a bit of time, the result is that we

usually end up with a number of variants for each one, usually getting more and more natural as we go

along.

If you're totally new to Chinese we suggest coming back to this show later -- the lesson is a bit tricky

for the Absolute Beginner level -- but we wanted to showcase it here for two reasons. The first is that

this show features not one but two dialogues. The interesting thing is that the first dialogue sounds a bit

stilted while the second sounds extremely natural. And since they basically saying the same thing, we

wanted to contrast and compare them, to learn what it is that makes mandarin sound forced and what

makes it more colloquial.