What Chinese Study Resource Do You Wish You Had NOW?

[mlescano]

This. My main gripe with FluentU was that they did not provide a .TXT transcript you could download and read with Pleco.

 

Is there something similiar to Fluentu but less advanced and for free? Basically a collection of materials, let's say (linked) online videos, with good transcripts and sorted by difficulty. It's frustrating that 99.9 % of random material is either too difficult or too easy; at least that's my impression.

[fabiothebest]

Also if not free, at least cheaper. I'm also interested in an alternative to Fluentu.

[roddy]

10 hours ago, mlescano said:

There are tons of hard/soft subtitled videos on YouTube, but when you're just starting to scratch the surface of a new culture, the interesting/fun stuff is hard to find. So posting a daily "I found this short video interesting" would be cool.

This is one of my pet hates about a huge percentage of the 'Chinese for foreigners' content. You're living in a huge and diverse country, changing so quickly even the locals can barely keep up, producing prodigious quantities of culture from the highest to lowest, most of which is available online one way or another, and the rest of which can probably be captured by walking out your door with a $100 phone. So why in the name of all that's holy have you decided to tell us about Chinese idioms and how to make dumplings.

 

The other end of the spectrum is when they decide to teach you Internet slang, which you'll be able to use for 1% of your life, with 1% of the population.

[Mati1]

4 minutes ago, roddy said:

... and the rest of which can probably be captured by walking out your door with a $100 phone.

 

It would be great if someone living in (greater) China would use his 100+ $ phone to start producing a free video series for foreigners (beginners to advanced so that roddy can get something out of it too heh). I'm looking for the easy stuff, others are looking for the interesting stuff. Perseverance might be the biggest problem and I'm probably underestimating the effort needed. Thinking about it, this should be a group effort, then there would be a steady stream of new material without too much work for each individual.

This idea gets me excited. Who wants to get it going?

I might help myself, but I'm not in China and since my level of Chinese is so low I would need the written version of what's said in the first place before I could do the subtitles or something.

[mlescano]

Idea:

 

Somebody start a thread for Chinese video content that:

-Is not too boring

-Can be watched on YouTube or another western video service

-Has either matching text transcripts or soft subtitles available somewhere online, or in YouTube itself.

 

The OP could add the best suggestions to the first post. A "curated list", so to speak. Even authentic native video content is manageable if you have the text transcript and study it in short chunks, so no need to obsess trying to find "made for learners" content.

 

If you play the video while following the transcript/subtitles with Pleco, you got yourself a DIY version of FluentU. The new iPad splitscreen option makes this even better.

[Luxi]

24 minutes ago, Mati1 said:

It would be great if someone living in (greater) China would use his 100+ $ phone to start producing a free video series for foreigners (beginners to advanced so that roddy can get something out of it too heh). I'm looking for the easy stuff, others are looking for the interesting stuff.

 

China Central Television (CCTV / CNTV) takes a lot of trouble to do just that, in videos and audio, though their equipment is a little better than a $100 phone. Their 'Learning Chinese' productions are entirely free, cover all levels from 0 up to 'Scholar', include transcripts at least for beginners and intermediate level, and Chinese subtitles in many programs for the higher levels. They even provide a role model with a few videos hosted by Da Shan (a famed westerner who speaks perfect Mandarin). There is indeed a lot about dumplings and idioms, but I suspect that is an additional strong encouragement to go through the beginners'stuff ASAP to move to the more interesting material. I quite like 'Journey Across China'.

 

Even the inevitable propaganda, which isn't too 'on your face' now, is part of learning about China.

 

[Mati1]

@Luxi Right, I had totally forgotten about "Growing up with Chinese". I've watched it before, as well as "Happy Chinese" (with Susan) and other things. However my Chinese was worse back then so having trouble with what's said in "Growing up with Chinese" was disappointing (and I was too lazy to try to decipher the transcripts).

I just now went back and watched episodes 2 - 15 again (the Chinese parts only). On very few occasions they speak very quickly and I couldn't understand it, no matter how often I listened. My vocabulary is also very limited. But now it's much easier for me to quickly look that part up in the transscript.

I don't mind when people speak quickly because I want to be able to understand the language as it's actually used. After having listened to a lot of material over time (granted, often with little comprehension), I often think to myself that if something I am listening to would be spoken more quickly I would still be able to understand it.

[Luxi]

Mati1, CCTV seem to have improved those pages and added material that had been taken off or was dispersed in other places. The sound quality of the "Growing with Chinese" series is rather poor, but at least the last 20 or so videos are much clearer.  

 

Slight disgression: I was very happy to discover a link to the series "Chopsticks" tucked away with 'extensive learning' on the right of a page. It's a very nice series with Chinese recipes suitable for (in their opinion) and explained to foreigners - part in English and part Chinese with subtitles. That's one up on Fluent U.