‘Allo, ‘allo!
Hey, how’s everybody doing today? Nimen jin tian hao ma?
Remember last week when I said I was going to be dipping my toes into the multi-media pool? Well, I spent a few hours on Saturday teaching myself the ins and outs of podcasting and I’m happy to report that I neither erased the Internet nor ended up in the burn ward with salsa chips in my hair. All good things.
My freshman effort went pretty well, all things considered. I had a lot of fun doing it, and I hope that you’ll enjoy it when you hear it. When will that be? Well, a little bird told me that it just might make an appearance on The Greatest Saturday Show in the World! (But let’s just keep that between us, shall we? Mum’s the word.)
So, listen, I know I asked this the other day, but I think it got lost in the shuffle of the enormous post in which it lived. To be fair, I’ll ask again:
What are some of the non-ChinesePod methods you guys use to learn Mandarin? What are you doing, if anything, to supplement your lessons? Do you watch movies? If so, which ones can you recommend? How about music? Got a favorite C-Pop artist? Know a place where one can look up the lyrics to Chinese songs online? What about games? Nursery rhymes? The Peking Opera?
I want it all. My plan here is to include these suggestions in a weekly podcast (giving full credit to the person who supplied it, of course).
So, come on. Let me have it. No suggestion is too small, too absurd, too ridiculous! All will be heard!
Thank you! Let the good times roll!
Technorati Tags: chinesepod
Hi, although chinesepod gives a great service, I find that if you watch TV in the language you tend to pick up a large number of everyday phrases…to do this you can watch:
http://www.pplive.net/
this is especially useful as you need not be anywhere near China to watch its programmes, and a number of them are subtitled in english or mandarin…has a number of HK and Taiwanese programmes too. (btw:I am not related to this website, just find it very useful)
Hi Frank,
how about a HSK A quiz?
see http://quizlet.com/set.php?id=6778
Ole
Pop music… I’ve been listening to Stephanie Sun (孙燕姿）
You can search for lyrics on www.baidu.com/mp3, click 歌词.
John has a how-to guide for searching for mp3’s and lyrics on baidu at sinosplice.com
Hi Frank, I ripped a tv series called 樱桃正红 into mp3s and have been listening to it at work for the past couple of weeks.. You can find it on lib.verycd.com. It’d be nice to have transcripts for it but I don’t think any exist. I definitely find that the actors in tv series speak clearer than the ones in movies.. and there’s more dialogue.. and less slang. Also liked the series 别了，温哥华 (filmed in Vancouver), and 北京人在纽约 (filmed in New York). Also pretty entertaining is 中国式离婚 (Chinese-style divorce).
Lots of favourite movies.. like Initial D, 那时花开 (Where have all the flowers gone), Green Tea, Beijing Rocks, and anything with 夏雨, 姜文, or 周迅, or directed by Kar Wai Wong. Favourite action movies are Hero and The Swordsman in Double-Flag Town.
Here are a few other sites I use:
www.chineselearnonline.com
www.melnyks.com
www.chinese-tools.com
www.languageguide.org/mandarin
http://trc.ucdavis.edu/msjacob/sentence.htm
http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/games/games.html
Hi Frank,
lately I’ve been trying to translate some lyrics. I find them at Baidu (Mike B gave the address) or www.1ting.com . What I do is first I write down the pinyin for all the characters I know and then start looking at the ones I don’t know. Then I try to figure out the general meaning of the song. And then I torture my poor neighbors by singing the songs about 10000 times
Sometimes I go to Chinese webpages and use ChinesePera-kun to figure out what is said there. That is faster than looking up everything from a dictionary.
I loved watching Chinese Paladin on YouTube, was great to see the english and the characters at the same time I was looking and listening to the series.
-Kaixin
Hi Frank,
talking to Chinese friends is in my opinion the most important and for me the hardest.
Besides that, I read newspaper articles, what makes me look up vocabularies a lot. Then I listen to Chinese music, my favourite at the moment is 周迅. Another fun thing is looking up Chinese recipes in the internet. The texts are short, the vocab essential and if you translated everything right, you have a nice meal!
Greetings from Germany,
Ingrid
I’m a flashcard guy. I know it doesn’t work for everyone, but it really works for me, especially for learning the characters. BUT, flashcards are all but impossible to find in south-west China and I’m not making a trip to Beijing just to buy 3×5 cards. So I get blank business cards made, 500 for 30 RMB, and use those. Every card gets one character or one “lexical chunk.” Been doing it now for about 5 months and am over the 2000 mark but have stopped counting. I bring these cards EVERYWHERE and study during all the little down time in my day. Really makes a difference.
I mainly translate about anything i see, also bought the advanced learner books and spend my weekends studying those.
Basically I believe that there is no “easy” way, it’s all in the effort. So whatever works for you and is amusing do it, I prefer for example, learning by doing, so I take up some sport or other activity just to link the terms to actual things I am doing, works fine for me, but is pretty time-consuming….and you can’t keep on switching hobbies.
Also you just have to learn to live with the fact that what you need in Chinese are things you need to be able to say, difficult philosophical concepts are not very useful if you have an English teaching job, but the words for verb and noun are look at things in a practical way and learning Chinese will become easier and less frustrating.
Getting a Chinese girlfriend helps out too….;-))
By far the best thing I’ve ever used for learning Mandarin (obviously not counting CPod) is PlecoDict on a Palm PDA. I use this every day. There’s nothing else that I do _every_ day. The novelty never wears off, and at around $250 for second hand PDA and software, it’s my best value for money purchase.
What I really need is someone to talk Mandarin with, but the Chinese people around here speak Cantonese, except a few who speak “schoolboy French” style Mandarin, if you get what I mean. I can hardly understand a word they say, and suspect that after two sentences it drifts back to Cantonese anyway.
I strongly believe there’s a way around every problem no matter how impossible it seems, and in this case it took a few months but I’ve figured it out. I’m now teaching my 100 words of Mandarin to every Cantonese speaker I can pin down!
There’s a lovely Hokkien/Cantonese speaking lady at work who’s too polite to resist my nagging, so we meet twice a week over coffee and work through absolute beginner lessons together. She delights in telling people “No, it’s the other way round, Sue’s teaching Mandarin to me!”
The thing is, you’ll never know what opportunities are there until you become sure there’s no options left. Then it’s time for second options to kick in, and that’s where you find the gems!
I think the ‘H&H China2Go Talking Phrasebook’ is probably the best program I have on my PDA. It may not be ideal for actually learning from but it’s great for revision and reminding yourself of the correct pronunications.
Besides listening to chinese songs and singing them along with the lyrics, I like going on skype and talking to my chinese friends, by voice. You can always get useful info from voice chat. The biggest challenge for me is finding some chinese people who can’t speak any english at all. It’s good to force you to speak in chinese. Basically what I try to do is to create a favorable environment around me (I live in Brazil and haven’t been to China yet).
Frank, your blog is awesome! I’m your fan!
Jia you!
Isn’t that interesting. I tried it out and found that program to be among the least useful I’d ever seen. It goes to show that we all have some different needs or wishes thrown in there along with the similar ones. Just as well, life would be so boring otherwise.