Growing Up With Chinese - The Series

February 29, 2012 at 12:48 PM

I've been listening to this recently and I find it great. I've downloaded a a good few episodes but when I download them they only partially download - usually about 4min 54 secs. Is there anywhere where I can purchase/download the full episode?

February 29, 2012 at 06:41 PM

Have you checked out

http://cctv.cntv.cn/lm/learningchinese/01/index.shtml

February 29, 2012 at 10:28 PM

Hi pprendeville

Yep, Growing up with Chinese series on CCTV is very good. I also watch and learn a ton from the series. The reason you could only download the first 5 min of video is because CCTV divides the video to 4 sections. The first 3 sections are about 5 min in length. The last section (credits and other stuff that I don't care) is about a minute. Some video capture software can only capture the first section and miss the rest. You need a tool that can capture multiple video section. The one that I've used and pretty happy with it so far is called Sothink web video downloader. See the link below:

http://www.sothinkmedia.com/web-video-downloader-firefox/download.htm

This tool capture multiple sections of the video for you to download them later. Enjoy! :-)

Patrick

March 2, 2012 at 11:01 AM

Many thanks Eranee. my question was more to do with not being able to download the full video as Patrick discussed.

Patrick, I'll download that software. Will the freeware version allow me to donwload the full video in one go or do I need to purchase the full version?

Will lesson 76-100 be available?

March 2, 2012 at 02:47 PM

tried this software (the free FireFox Add on) but it doesnt seem to work. is an icon supposed to appear when i hover the cursor over the video or like with Realplayer?

March 2, 2012 at 03:30 PM

Patrick, I'll download that software. Will the freeware version allow me to donwload the full video in one go or do I need to purchase the full version?

pprendeville, I use the free version and pretty happy with it so far. See the attached screenshot. The green circle on the top left animates when the video is detected. When you right click at the green circle, it gives you the list of available videos. In this care, Growing Up With Chinese lesson 32 has 3 videos (5 min each). You click on each video to download one by one. It's pretty simple. Let me know if you still have issues.

March 2, 2012 at 03:49 PM

pprendeville,

I just noticed that you have another question about lesson 75-100. I don't know when CCTV will put them online. Based on what I've read from Wikipedia, the online version is always lag behind the TV broadcast version. I guess they need sometime to convert the TV version to online version. Hopefully we both don't finish lesson 74 before they process lesson 75-100 :-)

Patrick

March 3, 2012 at 05:58 PM

That icon doesnt display at all. I'm use Mozilla Firefox mainly but I have Internet Explorer and Google Chrome but they don't appear on that either. Should it always be displayed (greyed out when not in use?) or does it popup when videos become available to download?

March 3, 2012 at 06:31 PM

I also use Firefox and the tool works just fine. In fact, the tool is developed for Firefox browser.

Based on the screenshot that you attached, I didn't see the icon next to URL bar. Did the installation completed successfully? You can verify it by going to Firefox menu --> Add on (or press Ctrl-Shft-A) to bring up the Add-on Manager. If you install it correctly, it should show up in the list (see the attached screenshot)... Yes when there is no video the icon is grayed out. When the video exists in the current page, the icon starts to animate. However, I don't see the icon in your screen. The only icon I saw was Download Helper which can only capture a single video. Check the Add-on manager.

March 4, 2012 at 04:00 PM

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for all the help. So here's what I did to get SoThink installed. On Firefox I clicked on Tools>Add-ons>Get Add-ons and did a search for SoThink and installed it that way. As per your screenshot the option to donload using Sothink became available. First of all I tried downloading Growing Up with Chinese files from following Youtube link (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFB7F966BC824B0E4&feature=mh_lolz) and it was very slow using SoThink (it opened multiple windows). I have a DownloadHelper 4.9.8 installed which was much much faster so used that.

Then I opened the following link (http://english.cntv.cn/program/learnchinese/20100824/101869.shtml) to try download from the CCTV website. Using Download Helper I can only get the first portion of the video. It's the same with SoThink - only able to download the first portion of the video (4min 54sec). Whats the story there do you know? Sorry for all the stupid questions.

March 4, 2012 at 04:19 PM

I think I realise the problem. I have to leave the video play up until after the 4min 54 sec mark and then the option to download the second half of the video becomes available.

March 5, 2012 at 08:18 PM

Congratulation! It seems like you finally got it to work. :-) Yeah SoThink is slower than Download Helper. DH can access the cache area and simply copies the data that's already on your hard drive and place it wherever you want to save. However ST only detects the links of video. Hence it takes a while to download. On the good days, it only take me less than one minute to download one 5 min Growing up with Chinese video clip; not bad.

Patrick

March 6, 2012 at 12:19 AM

Yes DH is extremely quick alright. I was thinking it was going to cache alright. Many thanks for all your help.

March 6, 2012 at 05:18 PM

No problem. Hey can I add you as a friend? I'm pretty new to this forum. It would be nice to have some friends :-)

Patrick

March 6, 2012 at 05:42 PM

Newish myself so work away. 我有一个新朋友。

March 14, 2012 at 06:21 PM

All 100 lessons are available now. My daughter is enjoying these.

March 14, 2012 at 07:03 PM

Newish myself so work away. 我有一个新朋友。

新朋友 --> like this word. straight forward. :-)

All 100 lessons are available now. My daughter is enjoying these.

Yep, I noticed that they just added new lessons. Oh wait a minute, shouldn't your daughter join this board if she enjoys learning Chinese? Are you her representative? :-) hee hee