Today's an exciting day for all of us here, as we get to announce the official launch of ChineseClass101.com. This is a joint project between all of us at Popup Chinese and the folks at Innovative Language Learning, who run nine of the world's best language learning companies teaching everything from Japanese and Korean to Arabic and French.

If you're familiar with the Innovative Languages approach to teaching, you'll know the strength of their materials has always been tight, step-by-step progressive lessons for beginners. At Popup Chinese we've historically geared towards more advanced students, so when the opportunity arose to cooperate with the Innovative team and work together to build something we leapt at the chance, and began work designing a focused and stepwise program for Mandarin instruction. The format and focus of the resulting materials are slightly different than what we have here, and we suspect will attract a different kind of student. The content is still excellent though.

Although a few hints leaked out (*ahem*), for the past few months we've worked somewhat stealthily to build the best team possible for the task. You'll find our progressive beginner lessons hosted by none other than the famous Frank Fradella. Our roster also includes the always-fantastic Amber Scorah and of course Echo Yao, Brendan O'Kane and myself. This is a great team and I can say with confidence I've never worked with a stronger one. With more than 100 lessons for beginners on the new site, our content is off to a good start. We're still squashing bugs post launch, but as Frank said once after a marathon recording session, "our first twenty lessons here teach more than I learned in a whole year studying elsewhere."

Sounds great, you say, but what does this mean for Popup Chinese? The shortest answer: a brighter future. We've just had our best month ever are continuing to grow as more people find out about us. In the coming weeks and months we're going to be continuing to push the boundaries of what it means to learn mandarin online, and release some exciting features and programs that aren't available anywhere else. We're going to continue to push our platform in new directions, and are excited at the opportunity this partnership gives us to take more risks and be bolder in what we do. I hope you'll stick around for the ride.

We think this is a great step forward and look forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts. It is definitely a major step forward for Chinese language education online: there's never been a better time to learn Chinese or a better way to learn it online. For everyone who has helped us come this far, we're grateful for your support and won't let you down.

Best from Beijing,

The Popup Team