My How and Why of language Learning PART 3 (final)
This will be the last post of my how and why.
One thing I mentioned as something I use for language learning is Bittorrent powerful little tool. This is a controversial yet extremely useful tool. I will admit that what I'm about to suggest may not be entirely legal where you are yet i don't think of it as entirely unethical. What do I use Bittorrent to download (apart from chinesePod archives) is Chinese Movies in mandarin often they can't be bought on DVA where you live or maybe they are still in the movies and definitely aren't going to come to a screen near you. You should be able to find them on any torrent search site. IMDB is a great way to find the names of these movies. A hint about these movies is to find ones that have a external subtitle file for English (if they have English subtitles at all) that way you can chose if you want to watch with or without subtitles. I would suggest to watch the movie a couple of times with subtitles then watch them without as many times as you can stand it. Another thing that you can get of course is TV shows... I would suggest you get ones that come from Taiwan though as they seem to be the best. Cantonese dubbed into mandarin is no fun to watch.
Now that I'm actually in China I don't need to use bittorrent for this (Which is why no links as they are mostly out of date). Not that here is anymore legal. I'm still trying to find a genuine store for things like collectors edition DVD's. (the best DVD I bought in china had an English review obviously taken from the Internet the reason it's the best is the review says the film isn't worth watching.
Just a few Tips: As you can tell I don't mind flash cards. Even if you really don't like them they can be useful if you have a few words that just will not stick in your brain. In this case just bite the bullet and flashcard them! It's a lot less painless than you think unless your trying to learn your 30 words a day from your Chinese textbook.
My Learning method is mostly about input and there are heaps of places you can get this. I also like a fair bit of reading input. Reading Chinese characters isn't that hard if you try and read a lot. Start with just reading simple dialogs and as your vocab increases find more and more difficult sources. If your reading material is digital use ZDT's annotator function so that if you forget a word a quick hover with the mouse will bring you back up to speed. You can move the separating bar down to hide the pinyin so you don't cheat as well.
I'll mention my Review lessons on more time as something I use a surprising amount of the time now that I'm creating them at a better quality level than I was before I'm going to start doing a 20-25 minute review session every night before I go to sleep. I'll listen to the reviews of the last 10 or so lessons I listened to I think it will help me.
My learning process is constantly changing and soon I'm going to be trying a more regiment aproch i'll document how this goes.
One thing I mentioned as something I use for language learning is Bittorrent powerful little tool. This is a controversial yet extremely useful tool. I will admit that what I'm about to suggest may not be entirely legal where you are yet i don't think of it as entirely unethical. What do I use Bittorrent to download (apart from chinesePod archives) is Chinese Movies in mandarin often they can't be bought on DVA where you live or maybe they are still in the movies and definitely aren't going to come to a screen near you. You should be able to find them on any torrent search site. IMDB is a great way to find the names of these movies. A hint about these movies is to find ones that have a external subtitle file for English (if they have English subtitles at all) that way you can chose if you want to watch with or without subtitles. I would suggest to watch the movie a couple of times with subtitles then watch them without as many times as you can stand it. Another thing that you can get of course is TV shows... I would suggest you get ones that come from Taiwan though as they seem to be the best. Cantonese dubbed into mandarin is no fun to watch.
Now that I'm actually in China I don't need to use bittorrent for this (Which is why no links as they are mostly out of date). Not that here is anymore legal. I'm still trying to find a genuine store for things like collectors edition DVD's. (the best DVD I bought in china had an English review obviously taken from the Internet the reason it's the best is the review says the film isn't worth watching.
Just a few Tips: As you can tell I don't mind flash cards. Even if you really don't like them they can be useful if you have a few words that just will not stick in your brain. In this case just bite the bullet and flashcard them! It's a lot less painless than you think unless your trying to learn your 30 words a day from your Chinese textbook.
My Learning method is mostly about input and there are heaps of places you can get this. I also like a fair bit of reading input. Reading Chinese characters isn't that hard if you try and read a lot. Start with just reading simple dialogs and as your vocab increases find more and more difficult sources. If your reading material is digital use ZDT's annotator function so that if you forget a word a quick hover with the mouse will bring you back up to speed. You can move the separating bar down to hide the pinyin so you don't cheat as well.
I'll mention my Review lessons on more time as something I use a surprising amount of the time now that I'm creating them at a better quality level than I was before I'm going to start doing a 20-25 minute review session every night before I go to sleep. I'll listen to the reviews of the last 10 or so lessons I listened to I think it will help me.
My learning process is constantly changing and soon I'm going to be trying a more regiment aproch i'll document how this goes.
posted by CharlesChinese at 3:36 PM
6 Comments:
I never thought of downloading Chinese movies. I seem to remember a very good Taiwanese "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman" which I watched many years ago before I started learning the language. Can you remcommend any other films for an elementary/would-be Intermediate learner?
One that I'm watching these days is called "The Promise" pinyin wu ji 无极.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417976/ It seems so have reasonably simple sentence structures. One additional thing i will say is that Comedies are usually not a good choice as the are often very idiomatic.
IMDB list of mandarin films
http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Languages/Mandarin/
have fun finding something that you like
Hi Charles, glad to see you back, I finally removed you from my 'graveyard :).
Not being in China, I also find p2p streaming TV very useful and the Emule network (similar to bittorrent) you can pick up a lot of Emule links for Chinese stuff from lib.verycd.com.
I recently downloaded the French film Amelie with a French and Mandarin soundtrack, I found it quite accessible because even though there was much Mandarin I did not get the film is very visual.
Thanks Chris, I pet hate about veryCD for some reason heaps of them are in real media formats and I hate RM files. Quality is often so-so as the files are far to compressed as well. It seems to be a Chinese thing (maybe as a lot of people don't have all those gigs I have doesn't really explain why RM though.
Charles, I hate RM too. If you use the videolan player though it eases much of the pain :). I have got number of Divx files of verycd also but it takes a bit of hunting.
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