I’m becoming a Mandarin-language cinephile! What made me think of this was realizing that I’ve recently seen three movies with the same actress, the beautiful Zhang Ziyi. I saw Memoirs of a Geisha years ago (which is in English and Japanese), but as part of my experiment I’ve seen Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (again), […]
My favorite Chinese movies to date have been Hero, Journey to the West, and Wu Xia (Dragon), but Shower, House of Flying Daggers, and Not One Less (pictured above), among others, are also of the highest cinematic quality. Films are a fantastic way to improve your listening comprehension if you are a student of Mandarin […]
I’ve created a new page, called Chinese films – learning Mandarin. It is essentially to provide a spreadsheet of the films that I have watched in Mandarin, all but one of which are originally Chinese movies made in Mandarin (one is half in Japanese). I hope this will be an excellent resource for other students of Mandarin […]
Chinese Film Table <– Download Here I have updated the table of films that I have watched in Mandarin (January 18, 2015). I intend to fill in some details in the coming days. The full file is available for download at the link above, which I recommend for anyone that is serious about using this resource. Please note […]
Disney movies dubbed in a foreign language are an excellent resource for improving one’s L2 listening comprehension. My reasons for making this claim can be summed up in two words: high quality. The better Disney movies are endlessly entertaining because they are brilliantly scripted and executed. It’s easy to understand why classics such as Cinderella and Snow […]
Besides fertilizing my eucalyptus plantation and spending time with family, my major pursuit for the past couple of weeks has been language study, namely my Mandarin project. It’s great to be on vacation! This week, I enjoyed sharing three of my favorite movies with my sister Sofia while at the farm. First, we watched my […]
I have introduced a new tool to help me focus on acquiring vocabulary while watching videos. If nothing else, it will give me a sense of psychological security that I am progressing, but I believe it will also help me make better use of my viewing time and better commit terms to memory. The innovation […]
After eleven years of countless international trips, negotiations, and grand strategies, I’m expecting to leave the international relations department in January, which I currently head at the Brazilian Court of Accounts. And I plan to make a most peculiar choice: to work in the Court’s IT department as a novice programmer, something I’ve never studied […]
I leave home for work at 8:00 am and return from Law school at almost 11:00 pm, with only a couple of hours in the middle of the day for lunch and taking my daughter to school. When I finally walk in the door, she is still up, and immediately asks me, smilingly, “Is it […]
In the past year, I have spent 259 hours watching videos in Mandarin Chinese (including about six hours listening to songs taken from the videos). I have devoted no other time to studying Mandarin in any other way. (I am not including the time spent purchasing and downloading videos, nor the many hours spent writing blog posts.) […]
