I don’t know – having very very slowly picked up Mandarin from numerous other sources, I find that shows & movies with English subtitles work well for me. I wouldn’t watch with a fluent person as my method would drive them crazy: I simply pause, replay, rewind, pause, replay…I’ve learned a lot of words and phrases that I didn’t know thru this method.

Sponge Bob Squarepants in great in Chinese, particular the version dubbed for Taiwanese audiences! (It’s different to the version dubbed for the mainland)

I agree, there are some great shows in the Chinese language! Never quite understood any arguments to the contrary. Thanks for all your recommendations, I’m sure readers will find them all very useful 🙂

It’s fantastic to hear that subs2srs is working for you! As I said, I read about quite a few people that have used it successfully 🙂

Glad to hear it inspired you in some way!

I talk a bit about anime and cartoons in the last article of this series (not yet out when I published this comment).

I’ve never thought about doing regular summaries, but I like the idea a lot!

Some of the Korean dramas when dubbed into Mandarin are actually really good!

The last one I watched was 秘密花園, which aired around mid last year in Taiwan. It’s just a love story at its core, but as usual I was fascinated by the cultural differences in the Korean setting.

I haven’t seen 蜗居, primarily because I only watch TV via cable here in Taiwan and they don’t air many mainland Chinese shows. The only two mainland shows that I’ve watched from start to finish are 唐琅探案 and 華麗一族. And I enjoyed both of them. I also watched a fair bit of 裸婚時代, but eventually got bored and stopped. That’s about the extent of my mainland TV show watching.

Yep.. spot on about shadowing! The key to shadowing is to keep it simple and fun. As a technical person I do use Audacity occasionally, but only to record myself reading so I can then present it to a native speaker and have them identify problems in my speech. For shadowing, directly in front of the TV is the only way to go for me! It’s super fun getting the facial expressions and hand movements going to!

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