What Chinese Content Do You Watch or Listen to?

[Dr Mack Rettosy]

I also struggle to find compelling content. Materials that hold my interest (independent of language learning qualities) are gems in the rough.

 

One show I've really enjoyed is 我是老板. There are a plethora of mainland accents, and the vibes of China mid-2000's is fun. The main actor is Jiang Wu and is absolutely hilarious, he's a younger brother of Jiang Wen. I'll share the wikipedia description because I don't think I could do any better:

 

Quote

Ma Yiming is a likable character, selfless, reliable, studious, hard-working, rigidly principled and full of righteousness, yet extremely unsuccessful; his often hilarious misfortunes highlighting the disconnect between the Communist-Party-propagated ideal and the capitalistic reality in modern Chinese society.

 

The full show is available with hard-coded subtitles on youtube:

 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4P1OCiJ7Wk9v6DsKSTlNXYjslCFX2vIr

[Woodford]

On 4/26/2021 at 9:11 AM, Apollys said:

I tried a few more 李永乐 videos and I have to say I'm sticking with my original impression. 

 

I can definitely see the clickbaity-ness of many of his videos. It's as if his videos are entitled, "Have alien UFOs been discovered?" Then you click on it. Then he mentions aliens for the first 10 seconds of his video. Then he says, "When alien spaceships lift off from a planet, they have to escape gravitational pull." Then he spends the rest of the video cranking through basic Newtonian physics, and the UFOs/aliens are never mentioned again.

 

Something about his delivery style entertains me and holds my interest. I might be getting dumber, but at least my Chinese listening skills are improving! ?

 

This summer, I'll be setting my reading practice aside and focusing on this sort of listening practice (my reading skills are too far ahead of my listening skills). So based on this very useful thread, I think I'll spend the summer months listening to a cocktail of IC实验室, 小叔TV, 一席 (the Chinese equivalent of TED Talks), Guancha News, and, yes, Li Yongle!

 

The "Mr. and Mrs. Gao" channel appears highly interesting to me, but I can't read the 繁体字 of the Taiwan-based content (at least very well). Learning those characters will definitely be a future project of mine!

[Apollys]

On 5/10/2021 at 8:22 AM, Woodford said:

The "Mr. and Mrs. Gao" channel appears highly interesting to me, but I can't read the 繁体字 of the Taiwan-based content (at least very well). Learning those characters will definitely be a future project of mine!

 

You'd be surprised at how easy it is to learn Traditional after knowing Simplified, especially if you're only going for literacy and not character production.  Just learn all the radicals and 50 or so of the most common different Traditional characters (后 for example) and you'll be able to read traditional decently well actually.  There are lots of common correspondence patterns, and context will often take care of the rest.

 

I can (strenuously, but can) read Traditional and I've never directly studied it beyond just learning the radicals and some weird characters for fun sometimes.  I think the rest came with just some practice trying to read YouTube comments and subtitles when they were in Traditional, and pretty soon I realized, hey wait I'm basically reading Traditional at this point.

[suMMit]

I like this guy. 小叔TV. Only watched a few videos so far, Tavel blog I guess. Really pleasant 北京 accent and speaks at a nice, easy to follow pace. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGROxvKCNwY

[madizi]

Is there any interesting Chinese content about economy, finances and similar things? Or tech, IT, AI,...?

[大块头]

2 hours ago, madizi said:

Is there any interesting Chinese content about economy, finances and similar things? Or tech, IT, AI,...?

 

It hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet, but the 得到 app has paid video lectures on some of those topics. Its free flagship podcast 逻辑思维 is pretty good listening practice because the host 罗振宇 usually touches on a lot of different topics over the course of a 60 minute episode. Like 李永乐, some have criticized the shallow way some of the topics are treated.

[Woodford]

I've been completely focused on listening skills for a little while now (and plan to be for the whole Summer, at least), and I'm slowly getting a better idea of the things I like to listen to. I am sure, however, that my tastes will continue to get refined as I gain more experience. Sadly, I'm probably evaluating things more for their language learning value and less for their other qualities.

 

The suggestions on this thread have been pretty good. 小叔TV will indeed continue to be one of my go-to channels. I've also recently discovered that he has an alternate YouTube channel, called Beitong北同. As other people here have noted, his speech is nice, slow, and clear. I like watching him roam around different Chinese towns--especially because I've never been there myself.

 

I've also found a channel called 大劉說說, and I can't exactly say why, but I find it a bit charming. Every culture has the "opinionated uncle" trope, and he plays it so well. He tells you hard, cold truth about the way the world really works. 

 

It's interesting to hear people talk about niche hobbies and topics, and 叨叨冯聊音乐 does it well--he talks about music and likes to analyze songs. I don't want to spend too much time on channels that are mainly about one topic, but I enjoy it for what it is.

 

Every now and then, I get some good practice by listening to 一席，the Chinese equivalent of TED Talks. I enjoy the fact that it features an endless variety of different speakers, and also that they are attempting to speak as clearly and formally as possible. And some of the videos also have YouTube-generated captions, so it's easier to use browser extensions to look up unknown words. 

 

Finally, I also like to force myself to watch TV dramas, because even though the dialogue is a bit sparse, they reflect the way people actually talk in day-to-day life--they mumble, whisper, yell, talk in noisy rooms, use slang expressions, etc. It's really challenging to listen to, but I figure that it's necessary to learn. Most Chinese people probably don't talk as though they're giving an academic lecture or a video essay all the time. I wish I could remember who recommended this series and under which thread (maybe it was this one, and I'm just not seeing it!), but I'm starting to like 摩天大楼。It has a similar feel to the American "CSI" series. It's a sort of murder mystery in which the detectives are trying to figure out who did the crime.

[phills]

I just discovered another source of audio content.  Previously I mostly watched TV shows/movies with subtitles as listening + reading practice. 

 

Now I'm focusing on reading, and that greatly cut down on my TV viewing time, impacting my listening.  But then I discovered there's a huge amount of free chinese audio book content online. 

 

For example, I read 流星蝴蝶剑 (Meteor, Butterfly, Sword) a few months ago.  I found I can also listen to it at https://www.tingxiaoshuo.cc/play/7864/1584583.html.

 

(I don't know how fly-by-night these sites are, audio links tend to decay faster than text links.  You can google many others)

 

This fills an interesting niche for my level of Chinese.  Right now, I'm not good enough to listen to a Chinese podcast in the background, because I need to focus on the language to understand it. 

 

On the other hand, I don't want to spend 100% focus and have subtitles showing/read along with the text because that's too easy.  That's the same as watching a TV/show movie, which I was doing before I drilled-down on reading. 

 

And I'm still not quite good enough to listen to a completely new segment in Chinese, spoken at native speeds without subtitles, and enjoy myself.  That would be "studying" for me, with pausing & replaying, as I'm afraid I'm missing stuff.

 

In this intermediate use case, having read the book a few months ago, I can play the audio in the background, and I can pick up most of the narration because I've already read it and remember enough of it. 

 

I can do other stuff while listening to it, and I never to pause because if I miss stuff, I can still follow the narrative flow.  Hopefully, it'll be like elevator music, and just burrow itself into my head.  Also fundamentally, I don't think you are really proficient at listening unless you can do it while doing other stuff, so this is kind of practice for distracted listening.

 

Anyone have experience doing this as a form of learning?

[道艺]

I recently started following some 淘宝博主. Been spending so much time on the subway checking out stuff for my new turtle tank at home that I eventually stumbled across a bunch that are creative and helpful as a new turtle owner.

 

The guy I watch most now is 小鹏说水族

[malazann]

bump. what stuff are you guys listening to / watching these days? specifically podcasts or youtube channels

[malazann]

I've been listening to a lot of 打个电话给你 - 2 chinese girls around ~30 who talk about various topics - each ep is a discussion coming from a listener question. relationships to career to personal development. They both seem fluent in english, and they sprinkle it in 

Probably the easiest native audience podcast I've come across. You know exactly what the context of the convo will be about, which really lowers the cognitive load when listening to them. 200 episodes so plenty of material

[Woodford]

On 10/23/2023 at 6:40 PM, malazann said:

I've been listening to a lot of 打个电话给你

 

That's one of my favorite podcasts, too! I have it in my podcast lineup, and I was wondering why I haven't heard any episodes lately. Then I saw that they seemed to have stopped updating the episodes around a month ago. Well, at least there are a lot of old episodes.

 

I really ought to search harder for more good Chinese podcasts. 史蒂夫说 has always been one of my favorite podcasts (because the host is really easy for me to understand), but it's mostly about psychology and self-help. 科学有故事 can be okay, depending on the topic being discussed. 故事FM is a mixed bag--sometimes it's really easy to understand, but other times, the guests speak in very heavy accents. I really like 随口说美国, but some people will find the host's strong Fujianese accent to be distracting (for example, he pronounces 内容 like 累龙). I'm also subscribed to 美国之音，which I find only mildly interesting.

 

As far as the huge variety of topics and ease of listening, 打个电话给你 is definitely the best.

 

I wonder what kind of experience people on this forum have been having with learning listening comprehension lately. Especially people who don't live in China. In my case...

 

1. My performance bottleneck is no longer about lack of vocabulary, but my lack of attention span. My brain just doesn't like to follow and pay attention, especially to a foreign language.
2. I have to cultivate the habit of actively listening for the sake of practice. My habit (even in English) is to listen to things in the background and multitask. Not ideal.
3. I am improving, but I don't often feel it; growth is slow. It's not a process of months, or of a year. It's multiple years, at minimum.

4. Some days are better than others. One day, I feel like I'm starting to get it. Other days, I feel like a beginner again.

5. My ability to understand certain things feels completely random. Example A: "And this is how we synthesize polysaccharides to enhance flavor in mechanically separated meat products!" Me: "Oh, yes! I understand that!" Example B: "I ate food on the beach with my daughter last Saturday." Me: "What? I barely understood a word of that."
 

Despite the above, it's been good, overall. Just not as easy as learning to read.

[malazann]

@Woodford yeah listening is definitely a harder skill to improve, or at least notice improvement. I find active listening hard when I'm bored or when it's too easy (I'll speed it up if it's the latter). I also only really listen to podcasts when commuting or walking

I've heard spotify recently launched an AI translate feature for a few of their exclusive podcasts, where it translates their english content to spanish (and a few other languages?). I expect this to reach chinese very soon, and we will be able to listen to our favourite english podcasts in mandarin! The tech to making the AI voices sound natural are also getting realllly close

[malazann]

On 10/24/2023 at 11:55 AM, Woodford said:

That's one of my favorite podcasts, too! I have it in my podcast lineup, and I was wondering why I haven't heard any episodes lately. Then I saw that they seemed to have stopped updating the episodes around a month ago. Well, at least there are a lot of old episodes.

I went back to the start and am listening to EP09 如何中英夹杂才不是崇洋媚外？ and hilariously they can't stop themselves from using certain english words. I really am starting to think this is THE podcast to recommend when making the jump to native target-audience podcasts. I find it even easier than certain parts of 還可中文 (haike mandarin) which is aimed at learners - the sections where they make jokes/references can be hard to catch

[杰娃娃]

I've been listening to quite a bit of 不明白. It's a podcast hosted by New York Times journalist Li Yuan and it covers topics that would be considered controversial in the mainland. The topics are mostly very interesting and they provide full transcripts for each episode.

[malazann]

I finally listened to 敏迪選讀 (Mindi World News) and it seems like a good podcast to cover world politics / events. young host who seems to have a bit of a following in Taiwan, bringing politics to the apolitical younger generation.  one of my airbnb hosts in Taiwan had an interesting world calendar that Mindi makes - every calendar page covers a country / group / etc. I'd be keen to buy the 2024 edition

website: 敏迪選讀 Mindi World News - 手機裡的國際新聞台

seems like there's an online version of the calendar: 分類: 國際觀察曆 國家 - 敏迪選讀 Mindi World News

[Johnny-5]

On 6/12/2021 at 9:20 PM, madizi said:

Is there any interesting Chinese content about economy, finances and similar things? Or tech, IT, AI,...?

I've just been looking for content that I'd otherwise watch in English, and actually some of the tech channels get better computer stuff than English channels.

 

like Linus tech tips getting only a 128 core Epyc processor

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvmbNUHQcxI

 

This channel got two 128 core Epyc processors, and played GTA with just the CPU. Leaps and bounds above Linus Tech Tips.

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1oH4y1o77U

but their Youtube presence is...

https://www.youtube.com/@Geekerwan/videos

I guess they've deleted most of their videos, but really if you want the Chinese video content you should be on BiliBili instead of Youtube.

 

[Jan Finster]

On 11/30/2023 at 12:16 PM, Johnny-5 said:

if you want the Chinese video content you should be on BiliBili instead of Youtube.

 

Is there a way to export the soft subs?

Or is there a way to download the audio to have AI transcribe it into text? The common audio extractors that work for Youtube, do not seem to work with Bilibili...

[Johnny-5]

On 12/1/2023 at 2:13 AM, Jan Finster said:

Is there a way to export the soft subs?

Or is there a way to download the audio to have AI transcribe it into text? The common audio extractors that work for Youtube, do not seem to work with Bilibili...

I don't really know, but I do know that the followup to Youtube-dl called yt-dlp work fine with Bilibili https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/

It's a command-line program, but it's not hard to use. It can get subtitles from Youtube, and probably also bilibili.

 

downloading just the audio can be done with this command: yt-dlp -x "URL"

 

I used it to download several series of lectures on confucius, western philosophy and theater that struck my fancy. Also found a number of audiobooks, loaded up the audio on my phone and listened while I was doing stuff.