Wang Ziqian contemplated the ceiling from within his cocoon of self-imposed isolation. For the past week our voice actor had remained in his room, substituting regular work for sleep, sleep and more sleep. And the more he withdrew from the world, the stronger his urge to continue doing so. In fact, why not simply spend the rest of his life in bed? Even a week in this seemed by far preferable to leaving the comfort of his room.

Learning Chinese? We'll admit that this is probably the wrong week to have a podcast about inclement weather, given that either nature or the cloud-seeding arm of the Beijing municipal government has given us fantastic weather for the National Day holidays. But no matter! And in addition to complaints about the weather, we're also going to cover a critical grammar point about how to talk about the duration of events in both positive and negative sentences. This is essential knowledge for anyone learning Chinese, so if you're working towards fluency be sure to listen.