any good TV series recently?

[Balthazar]

2 hours ago, drungood said:

I finished watching all 46 episodes of 都挺好. I thought it was pretty good. There were plenty of implausible/ridiculous plot devices, but the acting was great and the overarching story was a good one. It's a good show for learners because the vocabulary is not too difficult, and every episode on YouTube has English subs if you need them.

 

I finished a couple of weeks ago, and agree. It's the least cringe worthy Chinese show of this genre I've seen, and I was able to understand quite a bit of the dialogue, which was a huge booster. Probably helps that I have a strong affection for Suzhou . It does get a bit over the top and cliche at times, but overall I found the characters and the themes surprisingly relatable.

 

I recently started viewing "岁岁年年柿柿红". I noted down the name last time I was in China, as I randomly came across it while channel surfing and found the dialogue rather simple (although it's set to the Mao-era). I quite like it so far (only three episodes in), although it's quite sappy. Douban does not agree, as almost 50 percent of the votes are 1's...

[david387]

On 1/19/2018 at 6:25 AM, happy_hyaena said:

漂亮的李慧珍

 

I loved watching that series. perhaps it could be said that it was the first series in which I laughed and cried in Chinese. And I agree with you that it would probably be way too goofy if it were made an English. I wouldn't be able to finish it.

[david387]

I thought Operation Moscow was a great show

莫斯科行动

It's based on a true story. Around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, there were a lot of Chinese people going into Russia to do business. There were a lot of gangsters both Chinese and Russian. There were some Chinese killed on a train, but the Russians were not letting the Chinese police come in to investigate, so the Chinese sent some secret police to investigate, in the story mostly follows these secret police as they go about trying to see what happened and bring the bad guys to Justice.

[feihong]

I don’t see other people recommending reality shows, so I’m probably in the minority in that the majority of my TV diet consists of reality shows. But personally I cannot stand scripted dramas because the scripts are usually terrible.

 

A show I have been really enjoying lately is 心动的信号. The premise is that 6-8 people live in a house for 1 month and try to date each other. It is a strange mix of game show and dating show that is modeled after Terrace House on Netflix, which has elements of The Real World from MTV. This type of show has really taken China by storm since last year, and at the moment there are at least 3 different shows that run slight variations on the same format. Each season takes place in a different city. So far, they’ve covered Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Changsha. 

 

In general I can’t recommend these shows to learners because it’s pretty rough. The cast tends to be filled by locals, so they’ll occasionally slip into the local dialect (Shanghainese or Cantonese). I wouldn’t be able to follow along without the subtitles, and you need to be able to read pretty quickly.

 

However, the long-awaited Beijing version started airing in July, and it might be the best entry point. All the cast members speak pretty standard Mandarin (with the Hong Kong cast member switching to English when she can’t think of the Mandarin word), and they don’t switch dialects. Vocabulary and word usage seem to be pretty close to how actual people speak on the street. Plenty of slang for sure. Possibly the most challenging listening part of the show might be the celebrity guests, who watch the show and comment on the proceedings (technically the framework of the show is that we’re watching celebrities who are watching a reality show starring non-celebrities). The celebrities tend to speak a bit faster, and one of them is Taiwanese with a noticeable accent.

 

The plot (such as it is) makes sense and the character motivations are logical. The show visually looks better than 80% of the shows on Chinese TV. The cast members are charming and tend to have unusual jobs like sommelier, film producer, and toy designer. The celebrity guests, some of whom have starred in idol dramas, are actually pretty funny when they’re not reading lines from a terrible script.

[PerpetualChange]

A Thousand Goodnights (一千個晚安) on Netflix is pretty good. Slowburn slice of life with some romantic plotlines but avoids a lot of the melodrama so common in these types of shows. It's also very nicely shot. 20 episodes which are over an hour each, so plenty of time to practice listening. Unless you really like the melodrama that other shows have, in that case you might find it boring.

[zander1]

Just watched 上海女子图鉴, I finished the whole thing in two days as I found it really compulsive viewing. I actually thought it was better than the Beijing version, less dramatic and much more plausible.  Only 20 episodes at around 22 minutes each, what’s not to love?

[Mijin]

I am enjoying 奶奶最懂得

 

It's a show about a laowai who goes to various villages in China, learns some of their cooking techniques and then cooks some spinoff dish blending western and local tastes.

I like it mainly as a learning resource: the presenter is completely fluent but still, to my ears, enunciates more clearly than many native speakers, so it is helping me bridge the gap in my listening and sentence construction. 

But it's a fun enough show that I could watch and enjoy it even if it were not in Chinese.

 

(sorry if this is a dupe, ain't nobody got time to read 10 pages)

[DavyJonesLocker]

Started watching 《白夜追凶》 quite good actually and seems to be very popular in China. Its a police crime drama. Number 1 TV series (2017) on douban. 豆瓣 . I can't personally get into anything cultural related TV so really suits me .

 

There are a heck of a lot of unknown words and lead actor really speaks with a muffled voice but the interesting plot trumps the language barrier . At my level it's hard to know how to approach watching tv like this, except just go through most of the unknown words. Its in truth quite a bit above my comfortable leven but I am pretty sick of God awful "made for foreigners" videos and  texts, I think it's the only next step

 

 

[david387]

I have really been enjoying a television series about famous authors. this series covers famous authors from around the world, mostly not Chinese authors. but I have never found the series quite like this one as I feel like so many important ideas are found in books of the ages, and 梁文道 does a marvelous job of taking you on a journey through their works. The name of the show is 一千零一夜, not to be confused with a drama with the same name.

 

What is also nice about this show is there is a single speaker because it is a documentary similar to Ken Burns or something like this. I find it much easier to follow just one speaker rather than following quick conversations back and forth which is common on regular TV shows, yeah at the same time I'm able to learn new vocabulary that probably wouldn't be found in your average drama.

[Jan Finster]

On 7/20/2019 at 5:12 PM, drungood said:

I finished watching all 46 episodes of 都挺好. I thought it was pretty good. There were plenty of implausible/ridiculous plot devices, but the acting was great and the overarching story was a good one. It's a good show for learners because the vocabulary is not too difficult, and every episode on YouTube has English subs if you need them.

 

I agree. I just finished. It started strong, then dragged itself along for a while, but the second half was great again.

Compared to other shows I watched that had more action or suspense 都挺好 is way better for learning Chinese. It is full of dialogues, conflicts and everyday life conversations. There is literally very little action or conversation-free time in this show.

 

CTA data:

Total words: 76839

Unique words: 5213

56.97% of unique words are non-HSK

23.76% of all words are non-HSK

2022 unique characters.

 

The CTA data does not do the show any justice since there are tons of expressions or useful phrases in this show that are not captured by 1-2 character words.

 

I wonder if you guys can recommend any other contemporary shows full interesting every day dialogues (please not too rom-comy)?

 

[Jan Finster]

Is there a Chinese equivalent for www.imdb.com?

Whenever I look up Chinese TV shows, there is not too much information and only about a handful of ratings...

[madmaxxx]

That would be douban.com

[ouyangjun]

My wife just starting watching a show called 安家.  She suggested I watch it, so I'm going to give it a go.  Has anyone else watched this?

[david387]

6 hours ago, ouyangjun said:

My wife just starting watching a show called 安家.  She suggested I watch it, so I'm going to give it a go.  Has anyone else watched this?

 

Cool, I actually what's a couple of episodes of this. Tonight I watched the third episode. Slowly I have been weening myself off of English subtitles and doing just fine with Chinese subtitles. This show is not too complicated in I find it fairly easy to understand.

[Jan Finster]

On 3/14/2020 at 11:07 AM, Jan Finster said:

Is there a Chinese equivalent for www.imdb.com?

Whenever I look up Chinese TV shows, there is not too much information and only about a handful of ratings...

 

I also found the following:

http://www.chinesedrama.info/ 

(This site even gives you a link to the youtube with eng subtitles version in some cases)

 

https://mydramalist.com/

 

[StChris]

Since may people are locked inside their homes now, I suppose now is a good time for some recommendations. 

 

This Taiwanese drama from 2019, 想见你, caught my eye due to its impressive 豆瓣 rating of 9.2. I've watched up to episode 16 and it hasn't disappointed so far. In fact, I increased my daily watch from one to two episodes, and I'm enjoying it so much that I'm quite tempted to binge through the remaining 10 episodes this weekend. I don't want to describe the plot in too much detail, firstly because it would spoil the various little twist and turns throughout the story, and secondly because the basic plot sounds like a hundred others you could watch (basically, a love story spanning two decades). What sets this one apart is the likeable main characters, absence of any annoying characters, high production values, and the fact at 26 episodes of 30+ minutes each, there is a lot less 注水ing (i.e. adding in unnecessary subplots to pad out the run time)  going on than in your usual 40+ episodes/50 minutes each episode drama. Highly recommended!

 

 

Speaking of highly recommended shows with high 豆瓣 ratings, 大宅门 is a show I really enjoyed watching over a year or two back. It's the story of a family of doctors/pharmacists as they go through the late Qing to the early communist era. Although a little on the long side, it's pretty entertaining throughout.

 

[roddy]

@StChris I'm seeing broken image links in your post, how do they look to you? I'm wondering if you're trying to take photos from somewhere that doesn't want its photos taken...

[Jan Finster]

16 hours ago, StChris said:

Since may people are locked inside their homes now, I suppose now is a good time for some recommendations. 

 

I am at episode 31/41 of Decoded (解密) and I love it.

https://www.viki.com/tv/31007c-decoded?locale=de

This is a surprisingly good spy story of an autistic math genius turned spy. The acting is quite good, there is good action and suspense.

 

Edited March 21, 2020 at 07:49 AM by Jan Finster
grammar

[roddy]

That description made me think it was 暗算 but I see it is a completely different show. 暗算 is worth a watch, although it's so old I don't know if it's even available in any acceptable definition. Also the great 潜伏. 

[roddy]

Has anyone watched any of Till Death Do Us Part, 惊悚剧场, on Netflix? Taiwanese-made Netflix original, looks to be a horror anthology, so you get 7 30-minute standalone stories. Might try one. 

 

Edit: Watched the first one. Tough for me with the accents, but nicely done. College students locked in mutual death time loop search for a way out.