News sources or other subtitled media in Traditional Chinese?
So I recently got back from a very comforting trip to my motherland in Taiwan. I always joke that when I get back from Asia my Chinese gets better by a lot.
One thing I kinda wish I was better at was reading Traditional Chinese, since it's one of the barriers I have for fully communicating with my family and dimishes my confidence when navigating Taiwan.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fluent in speaking, I've had full on conversations with native Taiwanese and they're always surprised that I'm from America.
At the same time I feel like I should be keeping up with the news and general day to day life in Taiwan, since I plan on visiting more often because my grandparents are getting older and I really miss the country a lot.
I know we have a couple of people who are in East Asian countries/Taiwanese/Taiwanese-adjacent, I was wondering if y'all had any suggestions on things like news channels on YouTube or day in the life content that I can follow along with and match characters to practice my reading a bit. I can read at maybe a kindergarten level if that helps LOL.
I'm Hong Konger, and I rely on traditional character'd subtitles to understand Taiwanese YouTubers :) (my Mandarin is poor and I don't understand any Taiwanese). My apologies for not having new sources recommendations first of all.
許伯&簡芝—倉鼠人 -- mostly about pets and exotic pets and exotic animals, hosted by a really sweet family
how do you feel about watching Taiwanese dramas? - many are subtitled but sadly not all traditional.
Namewee has a lot of songs that are subtitled - he himself is Malaysian and he is aware that he's slightly/moderately controversial and proud of it. My listing him here is not an endorsement of every single one of his views on every issue, but I like a lot of his songs.
Speaking of music, can't go wrong with official music videos of your favorite Taiwanese artists.
I have a longer list of traditional subtitled, Cantonese language YouTube channels.....
Anyway following this thread with interest :)
Thsnks for the reply! The animals would be pretty interesting actually, just subbed to them!
For me at least, Asian melodrama in general is just a bit too much for me haha. I'm not a big fan of almost over the top drama that I feel like most C-drama and K-drama falls into, though it's been many many years since I've watched any, so if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them! It's the same reason I'm having trouble with immersion in Japanese/Korean, because it's a really easy source of learning but I can't get into most K-drama (or even anime lol)
I'm kinda ashamed that I actually don't know too many Taiwanese artists either, I'm super out of touch in that area. Most of my friends in the states are fans of KPop so I listen to that a lot, but it's mostly just music to me and not a source of learning.
Hey, no shame: you and I are part of the Diaspora and your taking an interest at any age is excellent.
Not....a big fan of kdrama either lol 😂 I tried....I really tried a lot of times...... Squid Game was probably one of the only ones I've successfully watched.
Newer Chinese drama I have no recommendations either.
How about audio book: grab a natively Taiwanese book or a translation of an English book you wanted to read anyway, and follow along with its audio. The best thing about this idea is that you'll be able to read/listen in the authors own voice if it's a native book, or if it's a professional reader and translation, then you can even get into highly technical books that truly engage and interest you, because if you get confused there's the English version available as well.
back to news, I think the CNA is your equivalent of the CBC right? https://www.cna.com.tw/ they seem to have a YouTube channel as well. Not saying rely only on them for news but surely better than random KOLs :)
BBC 中文 does a fair job as well , usually subbed
Hmmm CNA does have a Focus Taiwan section, but their Youtube channel seems to be in English for some reason? I'm guessing I need to search for the terms in Chinese to get the Chinese language channels.
I do like the idea of BBC Chinese, I hope they have Traditional subs!
Good idea on the English book -> Chinese Language actually! I might have to pick something that uses less fantasy or something but I've been trying to read more anyways.
Oh man!! Why didn't you say you like fantasy first?
碟形世界特警隊: 神探登場
Disc shaped world special forces 2: famous detective, appears! (It's Men At Arms rofl)
https://www.kingstone.com.tw/basic/2018730401279/
Oh dude I'm tempted to just buy the whole set now and be able to read it all for the first time again.
In general TW is an extremely literary people, sure whatever you're interested in they've got a book or two :)
haha i didn't want to limit the scope of what people were gonna suggest, that's all :) yes I feel like I've noticed that we have a lottttt of books and translations and I'm all for it tbh
Oh one more YouTube channel :)
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCw2W7GIqJNB-UMUxncnMuiw
黃阿瑪的後宮生活
This guy has a ridiculous number of cute kitties in the house and it's just a bunch to cute cat videos 😂
very cute!!! I do enjoy watching cats and pets in general, thank you!
I was thinking about it some more, maybe a Taiwanese creator for food or something might be the way to go too, especially if things are subtitled properly. I'll do some research and post ones I found after work!
As for Chinese drama I don't know any good recent ones, but this one, subbed in simplified, is really, truly, a masterpiece. 宰相劉羅鍋 Prime Minister Liu
https://dramasqtv.com/voddetail/9750.html
It's historical fiction: one of the last Qing dynasty dramas allowed to film at the forbidden palace. It's not 歷史（history）-- it very clearly says so right in the opening. But it is a 故事(story) : that is, it's 故(past ) 事(events). Wink wink nudge nudge :) it's the kind of political satire that talks about power and corruption and the flaws of authoritarian rulership that ....won't get allowed to be made these days in China. Basically there's the emperor, he kinda sucks, and there's the protagonist who's a good prime minister, and the antagonist who's a bad prime minister. They both dance on the shoulder of the emperor like good and bad angels, and follows the characters' careers and family lives and what it means to live as a poor person with a conscience, or rich person without, under an authoritative regime.
Traditional subs dvd available at Kingstone!
https://www.kingstone.com.tw/basic/3020000017632/
Incidentally the product description synopsis has a huge spoiler lol so let me know if you want me to copy paste translation for you
Oooh that actually looks like an interesting one! I'll have to take a look. (lol funny that I can actually read about 50% of the characters you posted so there's something there still knocking around in my brain!
Namewee's Wikipedia page says this about his name:
I'm not sure I get the pun? Can sombody explain this to me?
I had to start learning when I turned 40 so flash cards is the only way to learn as the characters are nonsense to me and require making up my own meaning to help memorize. My reading is pretty decent and better than my speaking. Anyways, I was about to give you more than one link but 2 have already gone down but Here's one for TV/movies. You might want to try watching American shows with Chinese subtitles first, it might be easier (maybe not?). If you want to find more sites like this is suggest you remember the Chinese name of an American show. You'll often get links to sites like these within the first page. My gf likes to watch Law & Order so this was one of the only ways to watch it with subs.
It looks like the link you had is broken! :( Thank you anyways! I downloaded common words in Anki and I'll try and practice those, haha. I think the difficulty with watching American shows with Chinese subtitles is that translation might have multiple words/different phrasing so I might learn something wrong. Do you have any shows you like in Taiwan? Or any artists?
Speaking is difficult for sure! Something about the tonal language makes it hard to wrap your head around sometimes, I'm lucky enough that my first language was Chinese technically and I spoke it all my life, and I still fumble sometimes.
Maybe try it again because I just tried clicking the link directly from my message and it still worked. Other ppl please try it and let me know if it doesn't work for you.
Looks like the site only does HTTP and not HTTPS. I had to pass through a disclaimer on my browser to get it to load.
Thanks!
Huh, I wonder if it's dependent on geography or something. When I open the page all I see is: 无法找到页面
I can probably find some ways to get some native Taiwanese shows and movies though, just gotta find some good ones!
USA person here. My parents stream Taiwan news such as TVBS channel on YouTube. There's also a Taiwan Yahoo segment that they listen to, but I can't seem to find the same hosts on the YT page. Idk what the political affiliation of those channels are, but my parents aren't very traditional. Maybe you can find TW variety show stuff like dancing or singing competitions, or hosts who just comment on current events. My parents used to have those on all the time when I was younger, but that was back when we had cable.
You can try watching shows in Chinese, though subtitles would probably be in simplified these days. My family used to bring us manga from Taiwan, so it was in traditional. Otherwise, your anki is probably good enough for daily vocab practice. There are also free language apps on the phone and language content creators on YT/IG/Tiktok who do small vocab lessons. Though I haven't seen any catered to traditional writing, it's still useful to have some educational content with your entertainment.
You could also text your family more in Chinese; lots of ppl in TW use LINE over wifi for free. It's easy to implement the handwriting tool on Android keyboard, but idk about Apple. I also use Pleco on my phone to look things up. The app lets you display in Traditional first, with a useful copy and paste function of the search result.
I think texting over Line is probably a good way for me to practice more practical chinese at least, I just need to figure out how to keep myself from using Google Translate for everything, thanks for the suggestion!
If you can read at a kindergarten level the news will look like hieroglyphics, unfortunately. There’s not a remedy to learning Chinese that doesn’t involve some brute force flash card vocab expansion.
The only suggestion I have is that likely your speaking ability outstrips your reading by quite a lot. Learning how character composition works is much more effective for adult learners, but is usually not mentioned in lessons since they just copy what elementary school students are learning. The vast majority (90% or so) of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, that is, they are composed of two or more base characters, with the radical giving the meaning and a phonetic component giving the sound.
You can thus look at a character you’ve never seen before and have a pretty good idea of how it sounds, and with context clues you can match that to your speaking ability to guess what word it is.
Is that always true? Disclaimer that I don't have any sort of background in linguistics but even thinking back to my early Chinese school lessons, I don't think we ever used flash cards, and I'm wondering if that's how my cousins or parents actually learned how to read. I never actually asked so I'm curious.
I do actually know some of the "building blocks" method actually! The "base words" thing is thankfully something that I do have an understanding of, and with traditional Chinese I think it's a bit easier that way honestly lol.
Thank you for your answer! I'm still looking for some sort of "immersion" type of thing at the end of the day, if only to keep my brain thinking in Chinese and to keep my vocab up.
Yes, not necessarily flash cards but you need to know 90-95% of the words to able to read and learn from it effectively, otherwise you have to look at dictionaries too much in between. Note that’s words, not characters, so you have an advantage as a fluent speaker.
At least I remember a fair bit of rote memorization. They didn’t even teach you the component stuff until much later.
Hmm that makes sense! I just downloaded a couple of common words in Anki, hopefully I can keep that up for a bit.
i kinda disagree with you there, @stu2b50....just kinda. You know how in Isekai's, one common trope is that the protagonist goes to a new world and they are confronted with a new character set, but the grammar and vocab are basically just Japanese? Or how if you transcribe enough ROT13 you can just read it straight? Or stare at Uknonw Pokemon for a while and you can just read it? These all happen very fast for your brain because you have/ will have full context and understanding -- your brain is super good at matching new images to existing concepts.
I think the news will have a lot of harder vocab, and might be a little more challenging to learn through osmosis as a first stop. Maybe watch a drama first. But it shouldn't be downright impossible or even very difficult if you're already fluent.
My background is grade 4 level traditional Chinese, learned in HK....but honestly nearly all of it was learned on my own reading comics, manga, then light novels, wusha novels, newspaper etc.
If you're an adult learner and already speaking the language, take part of Stu2b50's brute force idea and flash card the most common 100 words -- that'll get you reading most things enough you'll pick most of the rest up naturally in context with minimal look up
https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/faq.php here's a list by frequency