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Do subtitled Mandarin TV series exist? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5129 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 9 of 12 25 September 2010 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are may fansub groups doing tv series.
http://fansub.d-addicts.com/Chinese_Drama_Fansub_Map 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| junnis22 Newbie Joined 5164 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 10 of 12 26 September 2010 at 5:08am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for posting that, irrationale. I actually already knew that and although I do not believe it is equally effective with all languages*, I have used it in learning Spanish and know that it can be a great way to bridge the gap between written and spoken speech left by a textbook and a conventional classroom setting. Now if I could find a bunch of shows with subtitles in the L2 that I could read (i.e. in pinyin, not Simplified/Trad. Chinese), then I would use those, but I would never use normal Chinese subtitles when I can't even speak the language. Learning characters before learning the language is backwards, spending hours translating with a dictionary is not efficient language learning, and starting to learn a language before being exposed to its spoken form makes no sense. All "in my opinion," of course. As I am still in the earliest stage of learning this language in any case, I will not be using the Chinese subtitle and dictionary method. However, even if I found subtitles in pinyin, I would still use English subtitles (perhaps alongside the pinyin, though). Re-read my original post in the thread to find out why. All I am interested in doing right now is "internalize the phonetics by listening to hours and hours of it--and deductively trying to understand grammar and vocabulary by matching English subtitles to spoken lines." You don't need subtitles in the L2 for that. IME, matching a foreign phoneme with a letter right away can even be detrimental to learning to say/hear that sound. And as I said in a later post, "At this point I have no interest in using Chinese subtitles and a dictionary. If it's not fun and easy, I won't enjoy it; and if I don't enjoy it, I won't do it. If I don't do it, I'll make no progress." That's language learning to me. I realize that it's less efficient to watch a show with English subtitles only. I'm well aware that I'm ignoring most of what is said when doing this. That's why I periodically turn the subtitles off (or at least cover them up) in a systematic way so I can work up to a point when I am only using the subtitles to cheat when I don't immediately understand something and not as a crutch all the time. Also, I'm not going for 100% comprehension at this point. 10% is a good enough start for me. *As for my assertion that the L2 subtitle method is not equally effective across all languages, I have found thousands of examples while reading Japanese parallel texts where my initial interpretation of the words and the translator's translation of the utterance's meaning differed so much that I had to re-evaluate my entire approach to the language. It's not even a matter of grammar alone. The pragmatics of Japanese differ so much from the pragmatics of English that you could understand the literal and grammatical meaning perfectly well, but totally miss the actual purpose of the utterance to the point that you'd translate it wrong. (And yes, I'm aware that English subtitles are just one translator's interpretation.) I'm only assuming that Chinese may have the same pitfalls. True, it did help me with Spanish, but for the most part, you can translate Spanish much more transparently than Japanese. The past participle is there, along with its auxiliary; verbs usually have similar transitivity to their English counterparts... all that remains is to put the pieces together. The most important way L2 subtitles helped me here was to bridge the gap between classroom Spanish and spoken Spanish, which was vast. Curiously, I never once had that problem with Japanese because I started out with heavy exposure to the spoken language. If I understood the vocabulary of a spoken utterance, I'd be able to understand it spoken at any speed, even very early on in my studies. In contrast, I still have problems parsing spoken Spanish into individual words, even when I may actually "know" all of the vocabulary used in the utterance, at least when I see it written down on paper. Edited by junnis22 on 26 September 2010 at 5:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ZaneClaes Newbie Spain inZania.com Joined 4961 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes | Message 11 of 12 04 October 2010 at 9:03am | IP Logged | ||
Do I understand correctly that you're not learning Chinese characters while studying the language? I have to strongly disagree with your approach if this is the case. Chinese characters are intrinsically linked to the language in a way that few other languages can come close to claiming. It is true that the characters are no longer the full pictogram representations they once began as, but they still hold an incredible relevance to the language. I can understand learning to read without learning to write (even then, that can impair your ability to read script, since stroke order is so important). To learn Chinese without learning the characters at all, though, seems to me to be more than just leaving out a part of the language - it seems to be severely handicapping your ability to learn the language. I highly doubt I could have learned nearly as much Mandarin in the time I did without studying characters (though, I'm sure they're more important when you're actually living in the country). A practical example of why I believe this: By the time I got 6+ months into my studies, I could look at two characters and sometimes guess what the word meant if I knew both characters, or even if I knew related characters. I distinctly remember doing this for the word "turbulence" (湍流). I think that it is very much like knowing the Latin roots of a romance language - it gives you the ability to see where what you're reading is "coming from." There's just no way you can do that using pinyin, not to mention that I now find pinyin to horribly distracting due to the general inaccuracy of it as a representational tool (there are simply too many characters with the same pronunciation, but each character looks distinct and even feels distinct). Pinyin is very good as a way to understand how to pronounce a new character, but it is the functional equivalent of studying the "pronunciation guide" in the English dictionary (eg. həˈlō instead of hello). Not only that, by not studying the characters you're setting your self up to easily confuse characters that have the same sound. Chinese people generally aren't really even aware of Pinyin. I've known dozens of people who have studied to a high level but never known a single person to do so by just learning pinyin. Edited by ZaneClaes on 04 October 2010 at 3:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6173 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin | Message 12 of 12 04 October 2010 at 9:57am | IP Logged | ||
Fascinating. If I understand this correctly, the study seems to suggest there may be be value is reverse Listening-Reading with audiobooks, i.e., listening to L1 while reading L2? Edited by sheetz on 04 October 2010 at 9:58am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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