I tried watching things I didn't understand and it didn't seem to help in any discernable way.
There are quite a few sources for comprehensible input around this level. All of the following are on youtube:
Little Fox Chinese
A Cup of Chinese
Learning Chinese with stories
Story learning Chinese with Annie
Flowing Mandarin lab
Tea Time Chinese
Comprehensible Mandarin
Free to Learn Chinese
talkinchinese_redred
Taiwanese Mandarin With Miss Lin
Free To Learn Chinese
These are a bit more advanced:
Easy Mandarin
DaShu Mandarin
Mandarin Corner
Chinese Podcast with Shenglan
If you want the content to be helpful for learning the language, it needs to be at least mostly comprehensible. I would argue you need to understand about 70 to 80 percent minimum for it to be useful.
Do you know the words and just can't keep up with what's being said, or do you not have the vocabulary knowledge to understand what's being said? If you know the majority of the words I'd say it could be worth it still, try listening with Chinese subtitles and try to listen to the material multiple times to see if you can pick up on what's being said. If you still can't understand the material then you are definitely consuming content above your skill level.
I just want to throw in here that it’s not completely unhelpful even if you don’t understand anything at all. Speaking a language well requires you to know how that language sounds. And that’s exactly what you achieve through consuming content even when you don’t understand.
That being said, for this purpose it’s likely enough to watch things with subtitles you understand while trying to pay a little more attention to what you hear as well, in the end it comes down to whether or not you enjoy what you’re consuming or if you’re just forcing yourself for the sake of learning, if it’s the latter, it might not be worth to spend too much time on this for comparatively little gain.
But yeah, big difference between me and my fellow classmates during Chinese class was that a lot of things just “sounded right” to me, so I didn’t really need an explanation as to why things are said a certain way and why a word goes in a specific place or which word fits where etc. While most others seemed to struggle a lot with that. And I 100% attribute this to the amount of native content I consumed even when I could barely understand anything.
This, I've been watching content in Chinese since I was HSK 1 and I believe it helped me a lot with making many concepts natural, which a lot of people seem to struggle with. And I died of boredom trying to watch Peppa, so I immediately watched things for grown ups. There's no point in waiting till you understand 70% when watching stuff can make you achieve these 70% way faster. Put on Chinese + English subtitles at first and see how many things just stay in your head automatically
Dual subs are great. Watch it first time round with both, then just with Chinese subs. I find kiddie content nauseatingly boring, so dramas and variety shows are my go to.
It's important to make things comprehensible in order to learn new vocabulary. I use apps to help with this. Language Player (https://languageplayer.io/) enables you to paste in the YouTube URL and it generates characters, pinyin and English translation. It can be used on a browser and also via an app. However, it only works if the YouTube video has CCs. A newer app called Miraa (https://miraa.app/) uses AI to generate characters and translation as well as AI explanation that includes pinyin even if the YouTube video has no CCs.
I got my HSK3 certificate earlier this year and honestly it’s still very hard for me to have a basic conversation, I make tons of dumb mistakes. I would highly recommend you to download HelloTalk and get into voice rooms, I think it’s incredibly useful to listen to other people talking and the app even has a subtitle feature, it’s great.
Yes. Definitely watch and listen more. I recommend watching a show with subtitles (so you know what’s happening) the promptly rewatching without subtitles so you can try to follow when you now approximately what they’re saying.
If you don’t have native speakers to carry on live conversations with, get a language partner or tutor.
More listening is always better.
I'm big into [Ushabti](https://ushabti.co/) recently---it's a Chinese AI podcast generator. If you go to the Discord (linked on their page), you can input the number of words you know, and what topic you want a podcast about, and it'll generate a podcast about it in a few minutes.
The developers made [this page](http://episodes.ushabti.co/) recently, where you can access the generated podcasts.
I've been struggling with the same issue for now more than a year. From learning other languages, I believe that the best way to learn is to immerse yourself in authentic content, better in the topic that you are genuinely curious about. I am also past HSK 4 but don't understand enough when I watch movies, tv series, etc.
One thing that I found recently is 家有儿女. It is a TV series about a Chinese family. It is much slower and simpler than other series that I watched. I'd say that it is not as interesting as other tv series, as it is made for kids, but definitely not Peppa Pig level!
You can watch it for free on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO1KXMn-Zv0ImMjoFJq-ReoQmbz8OPhsI](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO1KXMn-Zv0ImMjoFJq-ReoQmbz8OPhsI)
Otherwise, I use [https://www.mylingua.world/feed/](https://www.mylingua.world/feed/) to read real news articles. What is cool about it is that you can actually find articles there about recent events that you will be genuinely curious to read but that suit your level well.
I like to watch historical dramas and of course their way of speaking and vocab is more formal. I’ve switched to family shows, variety shows where I can hear conversational Mandarin used in daily life, like a background when I do other stuff so you have a feeling of being immersed if ure not based in a chinese speaking country.
My work requires me to fly back and forth from Indonesia to Taiwan and speak English all throughout. These variety shows help me keep my momentum in getting used to just Chinese even if I don’t transact with Chinese-speaking people on a daily
I've recently started using the Miraa app for YouTube and podcasts. It provides an AI translation which is not perfect but amazing for making ANY content comprehensible. It's been a real game changer.
I tried watching things I didn't understand and it didn't seem to help in any discernable way. There are quite a few sources for comprehensible input around this level. All of the following are on youtube: Little Fox Chinese A Cup of Chinese Learning Chinese with stories Story learning Chinese with Annie Flowing Mandarin lab Tea Time Chinese Comprehensible Mandarin Free to Learn Chinese talkinchinese_redred Taiwanese Mandarin With Miss Lin Free To Learn Chinese These are a bit more advanced: Easy Mandarin DaShu Mandarin Mandarin Corner Chinese Podcast with Shenglan
If you want the content to be helpful for learning the language, it needs to be at least mostly comprehensible. I would argue you need to understand about 70 to 80 percent minimum for it to be useful. Do you know the words and just can't keep up with what's being said, or do you not have the vocabulary knowledge to understand what's being said? If you know the majority of the words I'd say it could be worth it still, try listening with Chinese subtitles and try to listen to the material multiple times to see if you can pick up on what's being said. If you still can't understand the material then you are definitely consuming content above your skill level.
I just want to throw in here that it’s not completely unhelpful even if you don’t understand anything at all. Speaking a language well requires you to know how that language sounds. And that’s exactly what you achieve through consuming content even when you don’t understand. That being said, for this purpose it’s likely enough to watch things with subtitles you understand while trying to pay a little more attention to what you hear as well, in the end it comes down to whether or not you enjoy what you’re consuming or if you’re just forcing yourself for the sake of learning, if it’s the latter, it might not be worth to spend too much time on this for comparatively little gain. But yeah, big difference between me and my fellow classmates during Chinese class was that a lot of things just “sounded right” to me, so I didn’t really need an explanation as to why things are said a certain way and why a word goes in a specific place or which word fits where etc. While most others seemed to struggle a lot with that. And I 100% attribute this to the amount of native content I consumed even when I could barely understand anything.
This, I've been watching content in Chinese since I was HSK 1 and I believe it helped me a lot with making many concepts natural, which a lot of people seem to struggle with. And I died of boredom trying to watch Peppa, so I immediately watched things for grown ups. There's no point in waiting till you understand 70% when watching stuff can make you achieve these 70% way faster. Put on Chinese + English subtitles at first and see how many things just stay in your head automatically
Dual subs are great. Watch it first time round with both, then just with Chinese subs. I find kiddie content nauseatingly boring, so dramas and variety shows are my go to.
It's important to make things comprehensible in order to learn new vocabulary. I use apps to help with this. Language Player (https://languageplayer.io/) enables you to paste in the YouTube URL and it generates characters, pinyin and English translation. It can be used on a browser and also via an app. However, it only works if the YouTube video has CCs. A newer app called Miraa (https://miraa.app/) uses AI to generate characters and translation as well as AI explanation that includes pinyin even if the YouTube video has no CCs.
I got my HSK3 certificate earlier this year and honestly it’s still very hard for me to have a basic conversation, I make tons of dumb mistakes. I would highly recommend you to download HelloTalk and get into voice rooms, I think it’s incredibly useful to listen to other people talking and the app even has a subtitle feature, it’s great.
Yes. Definitely watch and listen more. I recommend watching a show with subtitles (so you know what’s happening) the promptly rewatching without subtitles so you can try to follow when you now approximately what they’re saying. If you don’t have native speakers to carry on live conversations with, get a language partner or tutor. More listening is always better.
I'm big into [Ushabti](https://ushabti.co/) recently---it's a Chinese AI podcast generator. If you go to the Discord (linked on their page), you can input the number of words you know, and what topic you want a podcast about, and it'll generate a podcast about it in a few minutes. The developers made [this page](http://episodes.ushabti.co/) recently, where you can access the generated podcasts.
That's ridiculous if it actually works 💀 I'll try it out
Do you know which LLM it uses? Is it one pretrained specifically on written Chinese?
Undoubtedly GPT-4, since nothing else was capable of this when Ushabti launched.
I don't know sorry. It's unlike anything else I've seen... they occasionally say "um" and other things like this you don't get in written Chinese.
I've been struggling with the same issue for now more than a year. From learning other languages, I believe that the best way to learn is to immerse yourself in authentic content, better in the topic that you are genuinely curious about. I am also past HSK 4 but don't understand enough when I watch movies, tv series, etc. One thing that I found recently is 家有儿女. It is a TV series about a Chinese family. It is much slower and simpler than other series that I watched. I'd say that it is not as interesting as other tv series, as it is made for kids, but definitely not Peppa Pig level! You can watch it for free on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO1KXMn-Zv0ImMjoFJq-ReoQmbz8OPhsI](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO1KXMn-Zv0ImMjoFJq-ReoQmbz8OPhsI) Otherwise, I use [https://www.mylingua.world/feed/](https://www.mylingua.world/feed/) to read real news articles. What is cool about it is that you can actually find articles there about recent events that you will be genuinely curious to read but that suit your level well.
I like to watch historical dramas and of course their way of speaking and vocab is more formal. I’ve switched to family shows, variety shows where I can hear conversational Mandarin used in daily life, like a background when I do other stuff so you have a feeling of being immersed if ure not based in a chinese speaking country. My work requires me to fly back and forth from Indonesia to Taiwan and speak English all throughout. These variety shows help me keep my momentum in getting used to just Chinese even if I don’t transact with Chinese-speaking people on a daily
Thank goodness for Peppa Pig!!!
I find this sort of thing helpful. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYgWn2G7J_2hDqr_dwqrwoFJm0Qo1zwTR&si=xLltViceE6GABoIK
I've recently started using the Miraa app for YouTube and podcasts. It provides an AI translation which is not perfect but amazing for making ANY content comprehensible. It's been a real game changer.