Chinese Language Videos on Youtube
kellyl
December 13, 2013, 03:25 AM posted in General DiscussionI'm extremely thankful for all of the great language learning resources on the internet. I honestly don't know how it would be possible to learn Chinese 20 years ago if you didn't actually live there.
Besides ChinesePod (my favorite resource of course), I'm continually finding other sources to further my studies, and mix things up a bit. Lately I've been finding Youtube to be an awesome source of fun material.
One series of Youtube videos that I've been spending a lot of time watching recently is a program called Happy Chinese, you might have hard about it. It’s produced by CCTV and there are hundreds of episodes. I'm at about an advanced intermediate level, so many Chinese television shows are difficult for me to follow, but I'm able to follow along with this series quite nicely.
Season 1 was more like a sitcom with some strange language learning cartoons thrown in. Season 2 completely changed formats to a classroom discussion like setting, cutting away for short dialog clips centered around one geographical area. After the first area, they do away with the classroom (except for the teacher), and simply visit different areas, breaking away occasionally to discuss grammar points. I think season 2 and later episodes are quite a bit easier to follow than season 1. They’re still making new episodes, and every 20 or so episodes they switch areas. Each episode is 15 minutes long.
Here’s the channel where they post new episodes, there’s a new one posted almost every day:
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCds3NoVHxYfKYOkp8qOZAGg
The episodes are all mixed up chronologically on the channel, so I’ve organized some of them into ordered playlists:
Season 1 (116 episodes):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7sV1RQRp41uVrkmY2kzJplAk959xA5td
Season 2 and rest of 2010 (130 episodes):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7sV1RQRp41v09xQHYvjeSTIw5UVNi8eR
2011 (93 episodes):
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7sV1RQRp41uy8mVnvJTwbHVlnf6tUrNU
I'm still sorting through the newer episodes.
Anyway, I've been enjoying these videos so much I thought I'd share.
Anybody else find any similar kinds of resources?
kellyl
December 14, 2013, 02:33 AMYes, it's the same series. The CCTV web site worked fairly well for me while I was living in Taiwan, but from here in the U.S. I get a lot of waiting for buffering when using their web site, and the quality doesn't seem near as good as the videos on Youtube.
podster
December 13, 2013, 02:39 AMThanks for the suggestion. I think you are referring to the series that can be found here also: http://english.cntv.cn/program/learnchinese/happychinese/index.shtml
It might be a little better organinzed. The link for season two is at the bottom of the referenced page. How this compares to Youtube for convenience probably depends on which side of the Great Firewall you are on.