Looking for a large amount of high-level Taiwanese podcasts with transcripts

April 2, 2024 at 11:55 PM

Hi! Longtime learner with 5+ years of studying Chinese under my belt. I started with simplified for the first several years but for personal reasons now exclusively study with Taiwanese resources (Traditional SWC and the Taiwanese accent). I've reached a reasonably high level in both and can read quite well (with the help of a pop-up dictionary). I've read several novels in both scripts. However, my listening is lagging behind.

In my experience with other languages, I learn best with long-form paired audio and transcripts. For instance, I've listened to (and read) much of the content on this page already: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/61302-taiwanese-podcasts-for-chinese-learners/. However, I find that the episodes are not ideal in length or number; most episodes are 5-20 minutes in length and there are at best a few hundred short episodes with transcripts. What I am personally looking for is (ideally) hundreds of hours of paired audio+transcripts in Trad SWC with the Taiwanese accent. It's fine if it's designed for native speakers rather than learners, I am happy to make the jump. I really prefer dense and long episodes, like 45-60 minutes of continuous conversation or monologue.

Does anyone know of any resources like this? Specifically, hundreds of hours of paired audio/text? I've used audiobooks before but it's often hard to find audiobooks in a Taiwanese accent. I don't mind paying, although I'd rather pay for something like a patreon or website subscription to get access to all the content rather than one-off audiobooks. I've also tried both TTS (AI read-aloud) and automatic transcription services to pair a text to a voice, but both have their fair share of problems. Free TTS sounds robotic but the good paid ones get expensive fast. Automatic transcription (for instance, Spotify now has their own model) is OK but has reasonably high word/character error rate and is not ideal for a learner.

Interested to hear what you have to say! Also feel free to share if there is anything like this in Mainland SWC too, although I would really prefer Taiwanese if possible. Thanks.

April 3, 2024 at 12:16 PM

One potential option that I don't list in the thread you already linked is https://linktr.ee/one_call_away_podcast . They are not Taiwanese but their accent is pretty similar. The episodes are around 1h long and they seem to provide transcripts for paying members on patreon, however the transcripts are in simplified characters, even though on the website they mostly use traditional characters. I haven't tried it myself since I don't listen to their podcast regularly.

Another option would be to pick a good TV series and read the subtitles? At least the language would be closer to what you would usually hear as spoken language. I list a couple of shows here, you can sort by each column, e.g. country and total amount of hours.

You already mentioned audiobooks, but I think in Chinese the language can easily become too literal to understand when it's an audiobook, at least for learners?

If you happen to find any resource which matches your requirements please update this thread, I would also be interested.

April 3, 2024 at 10:42 PM

Thanks for the resource suggestion. Yes, that podcast is along the right lines of what I'm looking for. Simplified isn't the end of the world although from what I can tell even with the highest-paying subscription they only allow you to get one previous transcript per month as well as all 4 transcripts for that current month. It's probably not enough to justify the purchase, although I like the idea and content! I just wish they did what other podcasts do where you can download all the previous content.

I'm not a huge TV personally, especially because the content density just isn't that high. That being said I will look into the link you sent and see if anything sticks. Thanks!

I'll let you know if I find anything. Anyone else in the forums, please let me know if you know of anything similar!

April 4, 2024 at 10:08 AM

喜马拉雅, a popular audio sharing platform in China, can be found at https://www.ximalaya.com/

September 8, 2024 at 07:15 AM

I've found OpenAI Whisper has really changed the game for transcribing podcasts - I'm very impressed how well it does. If you previously tried automatic transcription services but dismissed them as being too inaccurate and too expensive then give Whisper a try. It can even create SRT subtitles files which you can use with WorkAudioBook on Android. It only costs 0.6 cents per minute as well. The drawback is you need to be a bit tech savvy to get it to work.