Learning Chinese/Mandarin with subtitles - day 7

Not much to add today. Just the fact that some first cards starting to be easier to understand (apparently).

One thing that intrigues me is if I am really learning the expressions [what could be called like this, I'm not sure] or just memorizing the scene and "the sentence" from that movie. To put it in another way, I'll be possible to understand the same expression if I find it somewhere. Maybe yes, but I think the magic of comprehension only occurs when I had seen (studies) more subtitles.

Learning Chinese/Mandarin with subtitles - day 6

Today, maybe I spent more time with my Deck, and happily, I could study twenty-two cards in about 30 minutes.

Studying the subtitle being interesting in terms of expressions I find trying to "extract" the meaning of the Chinese words/characters. Today I met an interesting expression, a slang language used by the Fúgui's father when Fúgui returned home after a whole night gambling again:

你这小王八蛋 (nǐ zhè xiǎo wángbādàn)

It was very offensive, kind of "you bastard" or "son of...!"

And as the Fúgui's father said (in a loud voice): 狗改不了吃屎 (gǒu gǎi bùliǎo chī shǐ), i. e. The dog unable to change itself will eat feces.

Have a nice day

Learning Chinese/Mandarin with subtitles - day 5

My Mandarin Subtitle [huozhe] Anki Deck is going very slow, but I think it's better than nothing. Of course, If I have decided to just listen and try to "translate" the meaning of the dialogue's extract would be much faster, but I like the idea of trying to comprehend all the Hanzi's I found in the sentence.

Today I just studied 10 cards, in thirty minutes, with any new cards on the rank. I have three revisions to do yet, before I started a new twenty cards group. I know that if I should dedicate all my free time to Chinese, my progress would be better, but I still have English and French to study, and it's not my intention to let them fall.

I think that is one of the biggest problems is learning a new language. I have seen many people who pretend to speak a lot of languages, but the problem is they really don't dominate none of them adequately. I sure, one of the problems is they take their time to one (more or less learned) to the other, and so we just see a guy speaking a bunch of sentences, maybe capable of mingling with someone but not so much.

That is a problem I don't want to have. My Mandarin must go slowly, without taking away my goal of improving English and French to be, as it were, my first language.

Today I found an intriguing sentence in Mandarin (maybe it's clear for you, but I needed to make some translation effort to give it "my" meaning:

福贵少爷起身了, 号的恒源伺候着

Alright, it's something like "Young master Fugui is leaving, who is going to get him at home?"

But dissecting the sentence by its parts, I reach something like:

The first part is fine, Fugui shàoye (福贵少爷) gets up, is leaving. But the second has a little different meaning with Long'er asking "who is next", i.e., who is next in the (taxi) line to leave Master Fuigui at home: 号的恒源伺候着.

If you didn't read my previous posts, I'm following the movie's subtitle (Picture and audio, of course) of 活着 (To Live).

If I'm not wrong, of course. What do you think, am I right or so far from the meaning?

Learning Chinese/Mandarin with subtitles - day 4

I spent some days without doing any Chinese Anki cards because of the edition of my Les Trois Mousquetaires with L-R method (and I still didn't finish it).

But today I restarted my Mandarin Subtitle study and I did 15 reviews, five new cards, and two relearned.

I doubt if I'm really learning something, but I'll continue the task until be sure about the results. Maybe this might improve when I start the L-R method with Chinese texts, maybe the Jehovah Witness' book of "My Bible Stories".

Because it's not being easy studying those Chinese Anki cards, I decided to do it in the morning, as soon as possible, to not postpone the study.

I also noticed that I'm going very slowly and after one month I don't believe it'll be possible to reach the middle of the movie. Maybe it just helps me to be used with the Chinese sounds. Not more. But let's see what happens.

Sentences like that one (below), it's not easy to understand without its context and, of course, the help of the translated subtitle

多许一更 = much more? or Could it be don't wait too much?

Frankly, I didn't understand the 一更 [yīgēng] expression. What means "the first of the five-night watch periods 19:00-21:00 "? I didn't get it.

How is your Chinese, could you explain it to me?

Learning Chinese/Mandarin with subtitles - day 2 and 3

yesterday and today I limited to listen to some cards, less than 10, because I was very tired as I spent a lot of time configuring two columns bilingual book to improve my French.

Yesterday was a day of learning the process of doing this. And today because the files have many errors (I did not format the txt good enough) I spent the day correcting the gaps. But I think that next I'll do much better. And as I'll be busy with the first I'll have more time to prepare the others.

Fallowing the L-R Method, I'm also planning to read/listen to the Bible Stories of JW in mandarin.

I hope so tomorrow I'll have more time to really study. Let's see if I will get some positive results from all this process

Learning Chinese/Mandarin with subtitles - day 1

Today was my first day in Learning  Mandarin with subtitles. As I explained it before, I've decided to study first the movie To Live - 活着 (huózhe). 

Today I could study 20 cards, and I decomposed each character, what I'm going to do with most of the cards.

The sentences seemed hard to me as I didn't analyze any subtitles line, so I found many long sentences which should be divide into two or more lines. But the idea is to practice, and not to spend too much time editing, so I'll deal with it as it is.

Example of one sentence in my 或者 Deck:

我[说]龙二，你 [这个] 皮影班主怎么弄的？

(wǒ shuō lóng èr, nǐ zhège pí yǐng bānzhǔ zěnme nòng de?)

But on my ears, it seems like the character Fugui only says: 我龙二，你皮影皮影班主怎么浓的

And my notes about the sentence was:

我[说]龙二 
我 [wŏ] = I 
说 [shuō] = speak, say
龙二 [lóng èr] = Long'er [Dragon II] 
"I say Long'er"
你[这个]皮影班主怎么弄的？
你 [nĭ] = you
这个 [zhège] = this; this one
皮影 [píyĭng] = marionetes 
皮影 [pí] = leather, sking
影 [yĭng] = picture; image; film; movie; photograph; reflection; shadow; trace
班主 [bānzhŭ] = leader of a theatrical troupe
怎么 [zĕme] = how?; what?; why?
弄 [nòng] = manage, deal with
的 [de] = possissive particle

Something like: how did you get this leader of shadow's marionette?

For that reason, I took so long to finish the twenty cards, and I needed, of course, to look for them on Yellow Bridge dictionary

One interesting point I notice is that I just start to intuitively understand some grammar points. Of course, I know a wee little thing in Mandarin because I've just read four units of The Assimil Course. But nothing near to able to understand without any deep analysis of the sentence.

Let's see if tomorrow I'll be able to understand some of these cards I saw today. An important note is to keep that I am not trying to repeat (speak) the dialogues (this is one thing I will first practice with some pronunciation deck, learning all those tones and pinyin). The goal is just to listen and "guess" what the man is saying.

Learning Chinese/Mandarin with subtitles - day 0

I decided today learning Mandarin with subtitles, using Anki, and its addon Watch Foreign Language Movies with Anki, with the help of some others tools, such as:

- Automatic Language-Agnostic Subtitle Synchronization - Alas: to help synchronizing the subtitles

- Subtitle tools: to make pinyin subtitles and/or merge two subtitles in one (in case it is two or more cds in one file)

- Traditional (Complex) Chinese and Simplified Chinese Conversion: sometimes I can find only Traditional Chinese subtitle. In this case, I can convert it to simplified Chinese (or vice-versa if you prefer)

The idea is simple, just take a movie, download the target subtitle (and your translation) from opensubittles.org and/or zimuku*.

* Observe that I do understanding nothing in Mandarin, so when I search for subtitles on zimuku, I use the google translate site tool.

For now, I took two movies: To live (1994) an Ip Man (2008). But I'm going to start with the first, because I'm not sure if Ip Man is Mandarin or Cantonese, because I do not have any knowledge to identify the difference, and the dialogues I analyze seems not to match the subtitles.

I'll give this a try for 30 days and blog here to let you know the results. Maybe 30 days is not enough to start learning, but we will see to where it can leave me.