Boring Bangongshi: The Chinese Office Comic

The word "Bangongshi" means "office" in Chinese. As an intermediate learner of Chinese, you already know this. You may be ready for basic office Chinese, but unfortunately way too many textbooks make the task unbearably dull and impractical. This book is chock-full of simple comics introducing everyday office situations encountered in China. (And we’re talking about the modern internet-equipped Chinese office, not some time warp into the 1980’s.)

Written in very accessible intermediate-level Chinese (using the simplified Chinese characters standard in the PRC), each comic also provides pinyin and English for the harder keywords at the bottom of the strip. These keywords are also provided at the end of the book.

Inspired by the “constrained webcomic” form made popular by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, with Boring Bangongshi you’re not going to be distracted by lots of crazy artwork. The artwork for each comic is nearly identical. While your brain still feels like it’s reading a comic, the focus is on the language of the office situations, with the artwork playing a very supporting role. You’ll be surprised by how well this helps improve your Chinese.

Learner Juliet had this to say about using Boring Bangongshi to learn Chinese:

"Boring Bangongshi is a great collection of fun little comics about life in a modern Chinese office.  As an intermediate-level Chinese student, I've found the style really unique and enjoyable.

"Each comic is only a few frames long, and therefore a really quick read. But they are written by John Pasden and his awesome AllSet Learning team, so the vocab and conversation are carefully chosen to help readers pick up new words and phrases in a more realistic context.  AllSet folks are experts at helping people learn Chinese, and although Boring Bangongshi might seem like it comes from a newspaper or other general source, the series was created specially to help Chinese learners.

"I've used the series with my Mandarin tutors as a springboard for a bit more in depth conversation, as well. I'm really excited to see a whole book of Boring Bangongshi."

Created by the Shanghai-based AllSet Learning team, this collection of 100 comics is fun, practical, and very OFFICE.