Resources and Recs #1

[starandrea]

Happy New Year!

And happy anniversary, because chinesestudy is one week old today ♥

Since I mentioned a weekly rec post in the community profile, I wanted to add: you're always welcome to make community posts about neat learning apps, interesting Chinese content (educational or otherwise), or other fun experiences you've had as a student of Chinese.

Or you can just comment on this post! Did the Duolingo owl say anything funny this week? Did a cdrama theme song inspire you to study its lyrics? Did you read any graded stuff you recommend, or hear a podcast episode that inspired you?

Comments in English, Chinese, both or neither* are very welcome!

*(Although apparently, "in a long message on Twitter of 16 January 2019, klingonist David Yonge-Mallo explained why Google does not translate Klingon.")

Comments

[starandrea]

I was listening to Molly's New Year's episode, No time for New Year Resolution, but time for phone! 没时间做正事，有时间刷手机? from the MaoMi Chinese podcast, and A) it made me laugh, and B) I thought, this podcast would be a great study rec!

Molly puts a lot of work into making weekly podcast episodes that are interesting and accessible. Every one of them has a Chinese AND English transcript on her website, for free, with pop-up translation for individual words and phrases in the Chinese transcript. It's amazing and fun.

Other great episodes include this one from New Year's 2022, along with these two specifically about language learning: What if I want to give up, 如果我想放弃了? and Are you a relaxed or anxious learner, 你是松弛学习者还是焦虑学习者?

[starandrea]

Oh! And also my favorite new strategy for figuring out when to use which word, which is googling "[character]VS[character]", like "云朵VS云彩". Google usually turns up answers from the Chinese Language Stack Exchange or Hi Native, most of which seem exceptionally helpful ♥

[grayswandir]

Oh, cool, I just tried this out with two words I wasn't sure about in the sentence I wrote today (通常vs平常 and 宁愿vs情愿) and got very helpful answers for both. (I had picked the wrong word in both cases and had to fix them before posting. XD)

Interesting to read about the lack of Klingon translation resources, though not surprising! I think it's the same problem Google has with Chinese dialects other than Mandarin. Even if there's some written content available (which is true for Cantonese, at least), there just aren't enough (good) translations into other languages for comparison.

[tinny]

Did a cdrama theme song inspire you to study its lyrics?

Not exactly, but it reminded me that I stumbled over omgchinese's lyrics videos last year. I didn't know they had those! They're unfortunately not searchable, so you have to browse them. But I love the idea anyway, and this is my favorite one:

https://www.omgchinese.com/video/p/gnJP5eZO

I tried finding more videos from her, but it turns out it's her only Mandarin song, she usually sings Cantonese.