Are there any movie recommendation sites for language learners?

[michaelau]

Hi forum,

 

Just curious, has anyone come across any recommendation sites for language learners for movies, tv shows or music? I'm thinking of building one but would love to see if anyone has come across one before and if this would be useful to everyone here.

[abcdefg]

 

22 hours ago, michaelau said:

I'm thinking of building one but would love to see if anyone has come across one before and if this would be useful to everyone here.

 

A site with movies would be useful to me. It would be especially useful if it had links to the subtitles in Chinese so I could review them when seeing the film more than once. Lots of old favorites seem to be shown again and again on Chinese broadcasting channels, such as CCTV Channel 6. I watch it when in Kunming, not on my laptop, just on a regular TV set in the evening. 

[michaelau]

Hey abcdefg,

Curious how do you create subtitled versions of videos that don't have subtitles? Couple of some chinese learners around me are saying they want to see english subtitles on chinese films!

Also prototype has been built today - would love to hear your thoughts and feedback - https://culturestride.com/culturehub/movies !

[abcdefg]

8 hours ago, michaelau said:

Curious how do you create subtitled versions of videos that don't have subtitles?

 

99% of the Chinese movies I've seen in China already have subtitles (Chinese Hanzi subtitles.) This is true whether in a movie theater or on TV. I've been told this is so dialect speakers (方言) can still understand the dialogue. 

[imron]

Also for deaf people - there are accessibility regulations that require it.  Edit: see 无障碍环境建设条例 here (chinese only)

 

Quote

第二十一条　设区的市级以上人民政府设立的电视台应当创造条件，在播出电视节目时配备字幕，每周播放至少一次配播手语的新闻节目。
　　公开出版发行的影视类录像制品应当配备字幕。

 

[michaelau]

Hi everyone,

I spent some time building a site to help language learners discover Chinese movie recommendations for language learners and people interested in Chinese culture.

 

Link: https://culturestride.com/culturehub/movies

 

What are everyone's thoughts on this? I'd love to get some feedback on this to improve it.

[roddy]

That looks like six random movies, with no info on *why* they're good choices, linked to some random video site which "只针对加拿大、澳大利亚和新西兰开放", and to be honest it all looks like an attempt to get traffic to your Chinese tutoring site. So no prizes currently. 

[michaelau]

Thanks for the feedback Roddy! Intention was to actually build this just for my existing students but I thought the resource could be useful to others.

 

That's a really good point on justification of why the movie is good. I was thinking of using upvote counters as a crowd signal, but would there be other signals that you'd like to see?

 

Has been pointed out to me that some of the content is locked in certain regions (I'm testing from Aus!) so that's a really good flag.

[Flickserve]

18 hours ago, michaelau said:

I was thinking of using upvote counters as a crowd signal, but would there be other signals that you'd like to see?

 

Upvotes is probably limited in value.

 

I would like to see some rating of the difficulty for learners and what sort of vocabulary to expect. For example, if you have a film set a thousand years ago, is it going to have a lot of references to historical events or ancient chinese that makes it very difficult?

 

 

[michaelau]

That's a great point thanks. HSK difficulty will be great - added into the backlog!

[imron]

26 minutes ago, michaelau said:

HSK difficulty will be great

Or meaningless, because at a guess it will be HSK6+ for the majority of all movies.