Mandarin Radio/News/Music

[darkprince]

What media do you find is best when learning Mandarin?

In AU we get mandarin news which i think is great as they have scrolling simplified chinese at the bottom and spoken mandarin. These combined make understanding a little easier.

I also find listening to mandarin music helps a bit, probably not as good as the news.

Radio is something i really want to listen to but have no idea where to start looking. Does anyone know a good talkback radio station - preferably streaming audio.

[wai ming]

I highly recommend SBS radio. Choose a category under Audio Highlights on the left column, or click on Archive for all categories. You can also save the files (right-click, save as). The broadcasts range from news to interviews and features on a wide range of topics.

[Qiuyue]

I don´t think it´s very meaningful to say that a (1) method ord media is THE best when it comes to learning a language. Rather, I think different method and media can be veru useful but in different ways, and I also believen that the mixture can be very important.

If you just sit in your sofa and watch chinese soaps, you might learn some, but if you instead spend 25 % of your reading papers, 25 % listening to radio, 25 % chatting on internet and just 25 % watching soaps, I think your learning will be much more effctive.

[imron]

CRI - Chinese Radio International is very useful for news.

They release 2 streaming broadcasts a day (each about 9-10mins in length), along with text articles that accompany the broadcast. They also have a real-time (non-news) stream which can be found here.

You also might want to check out this thread, which has quite a few good suggestions for using radio/TV to improve listening ability (TV doesn't get discussed until towards the end of the thread).

Finally, if you end up listening to CRI news radio regularly, you might be interested in a small tool I wrote that automatically downloads and collates the various articles from a given CRI broadcast into one document.

[lokki]

A whole bunch of them referenced here.

[xxl_male]

German radio has daily news in Chinese:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,2142,1680,00.html

The scripts are available but you have to click around a bit to find them. In spite of being state-financed, these German broadcasts are less propagandistic than, say Voice of America. They are just a matter-of-fact inventory of current events. The delivery is slightly slower than most mandarin radio broadcasts. The sound quality is very good, at least for surfers based in Europe.

[bagz007]

Xtra large male (that's a charming name by the way...so relevant to this forum),

No luck on finding transcripts on the German Radio site--you sure they're there? Any chance on throwing us a link? Anyone else have better luck? Thanks.

[xxl_male]

(Yes, I usually hang around in pretty dodgy forums, he-he-he).

If you click the link above, to the right are the sound files (with the self-explanatory icon). I think they correspond to the various news broadcast as they get updated during the day. In the middle of the screen you find these links :

2006年12月3日德国之声下午新闻 | 2006.12.03

The scripts should be broken down according to what place the news is about (Tokyo, Palestine etc.). They may not reflect the exact order in which they are read but everything should be there. Best thing is to copy and paste it into a MS WORD doc, print them and pay attention to the initial words to see which paragraph is being read out.

I can't be positive about this because I haven't yet listened much to the Chinese broadcasts of the German Service, only to their news in Indonesian, but I'm sure they have the same system, with the scripts being available after clicking around a bit.

[tiandixia]

"My gripe is not about Radio at all (sorry) but about a more leisurely way to ingest news and the language.

P2PTV is pretty good for most types of Chinese language programming, but it is so seriously lacking in the subtitled TV news department. There must be millions of elderly hard of hearing people in China, don't they get any television news at all? Other types of programs are subbed regularly and both soaps and movies are almost always subtitled.

I have not found any subbed news on PPLive and I am starting to doubt if there are any. One thing is for sure, it's not because news are broadcast live in China; they're read from a script, canned and played back to Joe Public. Downloaded script (if you can find one) just is not the same thing at all.

"

[babygodzilla]

what about magazines? i want some reading material but im tired of being online all day... burns my eyes... feels nicer to just have something to hold in my hands. any particular Chinese magazines you guys like to read?

[heifeng]

CRI - Chinese Radio International is very useful for news.

Agree, it is very good!

Story magazines:

故事会!! My bus ride wouldn't be the same without it! Stories are pretty good and not all about 暗恋 like other story magazines. Usually a lil' dark and humorous..

This is what I mostly buy at the newstands. 2 editions/month

Occasionally:

Magazines:

Cosmo (Chinese one of course, but you only ever need to buy one b/c they are all talk about the same stuff)

宠物产(狗) to get more info on your furry critter vocab

mina (technically a Japanese magazine with a Chinese edition, but has much clothing related vocab and the random English thrown into it)

漫画party is fun occasionally for when you need 5th grade humor.

[roddy]

I'd forgotten about 故事会 - reminds me of this post from way back when.

For my money there's not much point in asking 'what's a good magazine to read' - it depends on what you are actually interested in. Dress-making and Fashion might be easier to read, but if it bores you to death then you are better off with Modern Warfare or whatever interests you, even if you don't understand so much. That said, stuff like 故事会 is great for short, general interest reading. If you are into social sciences and literature, 万圣书店 between wudaokou and Beida's east gate has a decent selection of magazines and journals on the tables by the tills (or did last time I was there, a million years ago.)

[heifeng]

yeah if the above don't float your boat you can always go to the 兵器知识 type magazines...opportunities to use such vocab just slightly more limited though..hehe

hey, nice link above! ..hmm...故事会 can't contribute to that much brain rot, every edition says: "学写作,可以从读故事开始"...