It’s time to get dramatic.
Imagine grabbing your favorite snack, relaxing back into your favorite chair, kicking up your feet, powering up your TV or device… and learning Chinese!
Unfortunately, unless you’re in a Chinese-speaking country, it’s not as simple as clicking on your TV and flipping through channels until you land on a show you like.
But don’t fret—we’ve been blessed with the internet!
And through its magical powers, we can watch literally anything—including shows from Asia.
With the overwhelming international popularity of dramas, or dramatic TV series, watching television from Mandarin Chinese-speaking countries has become a popular method of learning for English-speaking students.
Dramas are helpful in gaining better listening skills. Many people acknowledge that when you don’t hear a spoken language often, you have a tendency to forget what you know.
In addition, repetition of words and phrases found in drama dialogue can make those words and phrases stay in your mind.
For the most part, these shows are built almost entirely around conversations, so you frequently find yourself hearing everyday phrases that are well worth memorizing and remain effective to use.
With all its benefits and the ease and convenience of just watching and listening versus studying, this method of learning has proven to be not only effective, but also fun!
But, considering that many Mandarin learners live outside of Asia, it can be a little challenging to find and watch these shows with ease.
YouTube
Yes, YouTube has pretty much anything you can imagine. Music videos. Makeup tutorials. Cat videos. It can be hard to navigate such a wild and massive world of a website with years’ worth of content being uploaded daily. But it may come as a surprise to some new to the world of Asian dramas to know that yes, there are full-length Chinese dramas on YouTube, free to all, with subtitles.
You just have to know where to look, since you’re dealing with such a big site with so much varied content. Of course, you can easily enter the show or drama you’re looking for into the search bar, but if you don’t know where to start, it helps to familiarize yourself with a few good channels that offer Mandarin-language dramas with English subtitles.
CN Drama
CN Drama is owned by media company NetDrama and is the English version of their YouTube channel entirely in Chinese, which, depending on your level, you may also benefit from checking out. They regularly upload dramas from mainland China for those in the Chinese diaspora such as Taiwan and Malaysia, but their CN Drama channel is aimed at English speakers, with titles in English and subtitles on each upload with no wait. Their channel offers both modern day and historical/costume dramas.
HunanTV
HunanTV is owned by China’s second-most-watched TV station after CCTV (which also has a YouTube channel). For this reason it seems the programming is much more varied, with quite a few reality shows, variety shows and, of course, dramas. Often, the content doesn’t have translations or subtitles, but that’s no issue if you’re an advanced learner.
If you aren’t, you’ll be pleased to know they have several playlists of shows offered with English subs, one such being “Come Sing with Me,” a fun music/singing-centered reality show featuring many popular Mandopop artists (in case you occasionally need a break from the world of dramas).
Those are just two examples of great channels to get you started, but there are several others with focus solely on Chinese-language dramas. And of course you can always find the best of the shorter-form Mandarin YouTube video world on FluentU. FluentU takes real-world videos—like movie trailers, music videos, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language lessons.
As mentioned, watching dramas can be great for your learning, but you do need a more deliberate approach in order to really gain from it. FluentU helps supplement your drama binging with more focused bursts of learning, so that as time goes on you can focus on your dramas without subtitles for longer periods of time and feel assured that all that listening practice is actually paying off.
Netflix
Netflix is another one of those sites with so much content. Like, sooo much. At least it’s geared specifically towards TV shows and movies, with many being international. So that helps learners narrow down things a little. Netflix pays attention to details and caters well to viewers and their preferences.
You can search by genre easily. Searching “Mandarin language shows” or “Chinese dramas” brings up plenty of options, including some Mandarin-language movies, all of them with English subtitles for those who need their assistance (whether content is offered in the original language may vary).
Read more at:
https://blog.lingobus.com/
https://blog.lingobus.com/learn-chinese/online-reading-for-kids/
https://blog.lingobus.com/kids-education/language-codes-websites-for-kids-computer-programming-languages/