Chinese language podcasts

[永鈞]

On 8/21/2018 at 2:29 PM, sekkar said:

Currently listening to 婊酱 / Bitch up which I find quite enjoyable. The show is basically just two women talking about different sex-related topics.

 

That sounds genuinely excellent! I have nothing against literature or politics, but it’s such a relief to be able to find some more lighthearted stuff for listening. I will give it a listen, thanks.

 

Vice Chia also records talk shows on light topics, I’m not sure if they’re described as podcasts but they essentially are. You can listen to them on the Vice中国 app. I listened to one a few months ago about whether or not a woman should find a sugar daddy.

[Luxi]

5 hours ago, RichS said:

I feel very stupid because I can't find transcripts

 

Well, that makes two of us  , the time I've wasted clicking frantically here & there looking for the transcript! It's devious. As you know, only some podcasts have transcripts, but there are additional complications:

1. Not all the episodes have transcripts, if one is missing try another

2. The location of the transcript may vary in different podcasts 

3. The way to the transcript varies depending on the device you're using. I know (more or less) where to find it in Windows 10 PC browser (Chrome, FF or Edge), Wndows 10 App for PC, and in iOS tablet/iPhone. Android devices may be different. The simplest and easiest way is using a browser

 

In Ximalaya.com, go to the podcast page, as here:

https://www.ximalaya.com/toutiao/12580785/

 

Select the episode to open its page:

 

...and once on the episode page you'll see a part transcript, as here:

 

Believe it or not, that greyed out text at the bottom  that may say something like 香看文 or 更多全部, is a link to the full transcript - click and there it is! 

 

This is for a Windows PC, if you're using some other device, ask again or click around and see what happens. Good luck!

 

Edit: this thread has something about the Ximalaya app for Windows or iOS

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/56572-the-ximalaya-apps-for-windows-10-and-ios/?tab=comments#comment-437575

 

 

[mungouk]

5 hours ago, RichS said:

 婊酱 / Bitch up

 

Or search for Bitchup in iTunes or the iOS podcast app and hit subscribe

 

 

[jannesan]

Hello,

I am looking for some easy podcasts (HSK3-4) which I could listen to on the commute.

The podcasts mentioned here all seem a bit more advanced, so maybe someone can recommend easy ones.

Short stories or news would be okay too.

 

Jannes

[大块头]

3 hours ago, jannesan said:

I am looking for some easy podcasts (HSK3-4) which I could listen to on the commute.

The podcasts mentioned here all seem a bit more advanced, so maybe someone can recommend easy ones.

 

ChinesePod

[Luxi]

20 hours ago, jannesan said:

recommend easy ones.

Short stories or news would be okay too.

 

Have a look at these too:

 

Learning Chinese through Stories

http://www.learningchinesethroughstories.com/
Free but asking for support. Excellent project, I don't know why it hasn't had more publicity, maybe it's very new in this format, though has a long history in iTunes (also free) and has a very big collection of listening material. 
The web selection uses videos for the lower levels, mostly audio with transcripts for more advanced.
It includes basic beginners level with much good guidance for learners, at least in the web version.
Where applicable, there are links to the articles' source making it possible to find 'more of the same'.

Also available in these sites

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/chingchingchongchong-chinese/id942258146?mt=2
https://lulaoshichinese.podomatic.com/

 

iMandarinpod

https://www.imandarinpod.com/hoola/
Registration (required) and access to most of the material (podcast, including vocabulary and questions) is free. I like the oral explanation of new words, very useful for practice.
Until recently it used to be available free in iTunes, but I'm not sure if it's still running there.
Podcasts can be downloaded.  The pdf guide downloads are restricted to 'special members' (paid subscribers). The podcast transcript is also posted on the site. 
Caters for all levels from beginners on and includes the very useful  听新闻学汉语 (news items read 1st very slowly and then at normal speed) that used to be offered by Chinese TV.

Slow Chinese
https://www.slow-chinese.com/about/
Free. Also in iTunes.
Doesn't separate podcasts by proficiency levels, only in theme categories. It has a 200-strong  archive covering different topics. Includes transcript and uses very slow speech, which makes it accessible to intermediate level beginners. I think the level is advanced beginners to lower intermediate, a bit higher level and the slow speed starts getting on one's nerves.

The transcript on the website includes translation to several languages (Spanish, Russian, Arabic...but no English?)

 

[jannesan]

Thank you two for the suggestions. This stuff is great, especially the short stories and the news items seem very good. I am gonna check all of this out today:)

[Luxi]

More suggestions --- Ximalaya is very good at 'guess you may like' and I keep on getting quite good suggestions, so many I have no time to listen to them all. Here are a couple of podcasts that look very good for learners.

Level: Intermediate to advanced

Both have transcripts. These seem obvious but here's a picture in case. Click and the full transcript appears.

 

听见王耀庆  
https://www.ximalaya.com/qinggan/14538140/  
"Listening to Wang Yaoqing"（David Yao-Qing）- I'd never heard of him before but a search reveals he's a Taiwanese actor now settled in PRC, so he's a popular hero of sorts. 

 

An interesting podcast and an excellent learning resource. It consists mostly of letters written in colloquial but educated standard Chinese. The Taiwanese accent is only faint and not a problem at all. The content is human relationships, family, parents, child, that sort of thing. It may get kind of meeh! at times, but it is all very useful everyday direct language. Also useful to practice letter-writing - double whammy!

I like that the transcript is in a graphic file and the characters are big enough to be read comfortably even in an iPad mini...but you won't be able to use Zhongwen or other pop-up dictionaries, without OCR, you'll have to write the characters to search for them  

 

Best to start from 1 (instead of the reverse order that appears as default on the screen), episode 22 appears to be the end of the series.

 

 

 

The other suggestion is a bit more advanced  :

中国历史朝代简介与简史   (Introduction and brief history of China's historical dynasties )
https://www.ximalaya.com/lishi/11574332/    

by 江涵余音 Jiang Han Yuyin.
50 short episodes, very clearly read and in relatively simple slightly literary style. All seem to have transcripts.

 

 

[jannesan]

Thanks so much Luxi for providing those additional resources. I have tried 'Slow Chinese' and 'Learning Chinese through Stories' and I like them. It is still quite hard for me, especially 'Slow Chinese' has episodes where I don't know many of the vocabulary that is used. So I think I will have to stick with these for now before trying something higher level. I am currently studying a HSK4 textbook and I would say my level is right between HSK3 and HSK4, having also read all the Mandarin Companion books and the easier levels of the Chinese Breeze series. It's really time to listen to more Chinese for me, I feel especially my 听力 is lagging behind my general level. So if this can provide some guidance to others, I am now using some ChinesePod (general Intermediate and QingWen lessons) and the above mentioned podcasts to supplement my learning.

 

Ximalaya is definitely on the list for the future though:)

[Luxi]

12 hours ago, jannesan said:

It is still quite hard for me

 

Yes, it takes a long time, a lot of effort and infinite patience to reach the stage where one can understand audios. 听力 will always lag behind when not  living in a Chinese speaking country hearing the language all the time. There is quite a jump in vocabulary size in HSK4, also in the grammar patterns one knows. It feels as if that's when one really starts learning 汉语. The learning rate noticeably  speeds up too. So,  加油！

 

I think you're doing very much the right thing and your choice of listening resources is very good.  Now and then you can let more advanced stuff play in the background. It won't teach you Chinese, but it is good to get used to the rhythm, intonation, sounds as well as normal speech speed, it will help later on - it's also very gratifying to be able to understand the odd word or expression.

 

 

[mungouk]

@jannesan all of the dialogues from the HSK 4 standard course are available on the Ximalaya app (user @Shirley017)... although I do find that app a bit of "wall of chinese" in terms of the very busy, text-heavy user interface. 

 

For HSK 3 I found a way of downloading the audio files using a web browser, but that doesn't seem to work any more.  

 

 

 

[Luxi]

Good find, @mungouk ! I never thought of looking for HSK material in Ximalaya, now I know better. A search for HSK in Ximalaya comes up with 6 pages of related podcasts covering all HSK levels, at least from 2 onward. Some are better than others.

 

The Ximalaya app  and the PC web version seem to have the same podcasts, though they may be organised a little different.

 

Ximalaya allows downloading to tablets/phones to play offline. It should work where the browser downloads fail.

 

[mungouk]

12 hours ago, Luxi said:

Ximalaya allows downloading to tablets/phones to play offline.

 

Yes... I'd like to get my hands on the files so I can put them on my laptop, and chop them up and stuff. 

 

Before I discovered the web hack (which was easy but no longer works) I downloaded them onto an Android phone using the app and then copied them to my Mac. 

 

I'll do a bit more hacking at the weekend and report back if successful.

 

[jannesan]

On 9/11/2018 at 11:12 AM, Luxi said:

Yes, it takes a long time, a lot of effort and infinite patience to reach the stage where one can understand audios.

 

I already adjusted my expectations with how much progress I can make compared to reading and writing. For me the big issue with listening is that just a few words I don't know can completely throw me off, whereas in English (also when my level was lower than now) it's easier to still stay in context even with a few unknown words.

 

On 9/11/2018 at 11:18 AM, mungouk said:

all of the dialogues from the HSK 4 standard course are available on the Ximalaya app

 

You mean the lesson dialogues (always 5 per chapter) right? I luckily got the audio files for those from my teacher, if you're still looking for them, send me a message. However, those are really short and not enough to consolidate all the HSK4 vocabulary, at least for me. Do you know of any other audio that is specifically with only HSK vocabulary?

[mungouk]

On 9/12/2018 at 10:36 PM, jannesan said:

You mean the lesson dialogues (always 5 per chapter) right? I luckily got the audio files for those from my teacher, if you're still looking for them [...]

Do you know of any other audio that is specifically with only HSK vocabulary?

 

Thanks, I've got them somewhere if I can lay my hands on the CD...!

 

If you're aiming to do the test then the HSK Workbooks which accompanies the Textbooks also have different audio, in a similar format to the tests, to go with the workbook exercises. Each chapter follows the chapter in the textbook so (in theory, but see discussion) the level of vocabulary and grammar points used are the same.

 

I found them useful for listening practice and working up to the test at Level 3, but haven't seen the Level 4 Workbook yet — it's on order. 

Same user as before has them on ximalaya for workbook 4上.

 

[Luxi]

Another podcast with a good voice (male) and transcripts in Ximalaya: 

滔哥读美文
(Brother Tao reads beautiful prose)
https://www.ximalaya.com/renwen/7247689/

IMO, good material for transcribing / shadowing. The selections are from famous authors,  choice is varied, most rather easy to read and have useful everyday vocabulary. Most have transcripts. Missing transcripts are easy to find online, just paste the title on a search window (Google or Baidu are quite good at finding essays).

There aren't that many easy readings with good male voices, this anchor, Brother Tao, is very pleasant to listen to and very clear. 

..and don't forget that if listening in a PC / laptop, you can lower the speed to X0.75% - which is just about perfect for transcribing.

 

[simc]

A couple I've being enjoying recently:

 

Podcast feed of News 98 (九八新聞台). This is a FM news station in Taiwan. Lots of interesting interviews and commentry as well as some more light hearted programmes. They have a YouTube channel as well 

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCOc2A2GJ9-WhjZSUO3nVEgQ

 

GushiFM http://storyfm.cn/ - sort of similar to This American Life. There was an article about it recently in NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/world/asia/china-podcast-gushi-fm.html

[Balthazar]

8 hours ago, simc said:

GushiFM http://storyfm.cn/ - sort of similar to This American Life. There was an article about it recently in NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/world/asia/china-podcast-gushi-fm.html

 

Thanks for recommending this, I've just started on an episode but this seems to be a really special podcast. Right up my alley in terms of content and style.

[Balthazar]

Ten episodes in, and GushiFM is really great!

 

I couldn't find a convenient way to download the mp3-files from the homepage, so I wrote a simple script that scrapes all the mp3-URLs and downloads the episodes (which are placed in a "GushiFM"-subfolder). Here the github page, in case anyone's interested. (You'll need to have python 3 and the libraries Requests and Selenium installed, as well as Firefox and geckodriver. I plan to rewrite it so that only Python 3 + Requests is necessary.) Only tested on Ubuntu.

 

The Chinese server is really slow for me, so it took several hours to download the 5,6+ GB of mp3s, but well worth it for 100+ hours of great content that I can now listen to offline.

 

I plan to update the script to check for episodes that have already been downloaded, so that I can use it to add only new episodes and not have to download all 300+ of them.

 

PS: If anyone would like the direct URLs to the episodes and mp3-files (as of today), here's a paste.

[simc]

Or you could just use the RSS feed and your favourite podcast app.

 

http://storyfm.cn/feed/episodes

 

Or Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/故事-fm/id1256399960