Watching Chinese films helps me learn

I have always enjoyed watching good foreign films. As part of my learning I try to watch Chinese films fairly regularly. Recently I watched 2046 and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.
 
2046 is best described as drama, sci-fi, romance. A quote from the film is "All who go to 2046 never come back, except one." What was interesting to me is that one character speaks Mandarin while another speaks Cantonese, in the same conversation. Apparently this is not uncommon in real life. There is also some Japanese speaking, which I found very interesting.  So have a look at 2046.

 

Another film that I really enjoy (can watch it over and over) is Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.  The story is about two young men sent for a Maoist "re-education" in the mountains fall in love with the village tailor's granddaughter. I find the setting for this movie very beautiful.  Life is hard for the villagers, but the place looks like a mountain I would like to live on. The village and surrounding countryside makes me think of Shangri-La or other earthly paradise. Have a look at Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

 

At this stage of my learning I do not understand  very much. 我听不懂。However, I am able to pick up words and phrases.  I couldn’t watch the films without subtitles, but still find this a very pleasurable way to enhance my learning. I often watch these films a couple of times just to see if I can pick up more Mandarin the next time I watch.

Free Chinese Video Lessons - Peggy Teaches Chinese

When I want to practice or learn a specific skill or grammar point in Chinese I often have a search on YouTube. There are lots of native speaker teachers very keen to teach their language. Of course there is a range of quality of the videos and they don’t always match up exactly with my current language learning needs. Despite this I have a couple of favourite YouTube teachers. One of these teachers is Peggy she has a serious of videos called Peggy Teaches Chinese.

The quality of the videos are quite good, grammar explanations are very good. For a quick short explanation I find these types of videos perfect for my learning needs.  As Peggy is Taiwanese and the Taiwanese use traditional characters and the tones are not marked with tone marks but numbers these aspects are not useful to me. On the plus side the videos are often short, practical and very well explained. I like the role plays and the humour too. All parts played by Peggy.  Have a look and see what you think of the following examples.