#at least there’s the caveat that I can draw if all tasks are completed beforehand but -

[byakuyasdarling]

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[rigelmejo]

i’ve been watching Handsome Siblings on netflix only in chinese to just like. see where i’m at.

and now that i’m on ep 4 it would feel kind of weird to suddenly switch back to english subs ok, for one.

but anyway like general level-wise: i am pretty much at where i can follow a lot of the gist of scenes even if i don’t pause to translate - but then i’m going to be relying on visual context a lot more. which is fine, it means i can go watch a show with no english subs to rely on Ever and at least follow along.

i do notice that if i PAUSE, i can catch the specifics of a lot more scenes. There’s a scene where the two princess sisters are talking to their nephew (who is a spitting image of Jiang Feng), and then after he leaves - discussing telling him to go take a mission to kill Xiao Yu’er, and then when he leaves the two princesses discuss their plan. I paused over and over after EVERY line that episode, because I really wanted to know the specifics of what they were saying. A lot of lines I could read, and there were a lot of one-words-in-a-sentence i had to look up for a more precise understanding. Same with a scene later in the town said-nephew and his girl kickass companions go to - i could follow the gist, but paused after some lines (and looked up a couple words) for more specific details. 

I will say that the more characters you learn, the easier life is. Really! The more characters I know, the easier my gist-guess is right, the easier remembering new words (made up of known characters) is, and looking up new words is VASTLY easier because I know their pinyin and can look them up faster than drawing. 

If you’re going to do this: I’d still recommend using googletranslate to look up multiple characters you don’t know/phrases, since you can draw and easily get the correct result looked up. I’d recommend pleco if you know the pinyin, or if its a single word (because pleco’s definitions are more thorough and explanatory than googletranslate’s), or if it might be an idiom. 

I would recommend that if you like watching stuff on the computer, to get the learn-with-netflix dual subtitle add on, and just click your subtitles for a definition on-the-video-itself instead of needing to open an app like me. 

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I am immensely excited and happy that I can watch a chinese show with no english and follow the gist now. That is a huge amount of progress for me compared with August 2019 when I started (and only knew ‘ni hao/wo hen hao’ and the numbers ;w; ). I am so proud of where I’ve gotten to. I definitely think really focusing on increasing known frequent words helps a lot. (Also, reading a grammar guide - grammar is again becoming understandable, so idk my brain is just acclimating again i guess). I’m going to keep focusing on frequent words, and the 2,000 most common characters, for a while and hopefully eventually this payoff will translate to reading as well.

If you DO happen to want to try watching a chinese show without english and testing yourself/studying, I have some mild recommendations you might take into consideration. 

1. If it’s too difficult, do it a little, then come back to it in a few weeks, repeat. This task really only gets enjoyable once you understand enough to be ‘comfortable’ with the remaining ambiguity you still don’t comprehend. That is going to be different for different people. I am comfortable with a pretty high amount of ambiguity/lack of understanding, so I can at least try to watch even stuff-i-barely-grasp at least a little for practice until my brain feels fried. But I’ve been trying this for months... its only NOW that my brain feels relatively okay just watching without pausing, without feeling Completely overwhelmed. And if you do intend to watch without pausing much, you’ll have some degree of not-understanding-everything. Likewise, if you plan to pause the show (and how much you plan to pause it) should be tolerable for you as well. If you have to pause everything, understand everything - do you know enough words to do that in a timely enough manner to get THROUGH an episode? If it takes you a long time, are you willing to intensively focus and look things up that entire time? Basically - what is your tradeoff between you being able to pause and focus intensively on looking things up, versus you being able to watch without pausing and interpret from the words you know/context only. Whatever balance is most enjoyable/bearable for you is when this will start being something that’s easier to do regularly, instead of only occasionally as practice. At least, that’s how it was for me. I’m only finally at  a point where I can do this regularly - before I could only do this for maybe 10-20 minute chunks of time occasionally. 

2. Pick a genre of show/material you are going to engage in frequently. If you’re ALWAYS watching case-type shows, those words and those scenes will be more familiar to you and easier for you to interpret from context and with less looking things up. If you try this with a wildly different kind of show, you may know MANY less words and many scenes may be harder for you to comprehend the gist of. I watch a TON of case type shows so they’re very easy for me to see and pick up words I’m familiar with, single out the parts that are ‘important explanation’ versus ‘some crowd saying unimportant WOW oh No how Horrible’ type lines. So i can cherry pick important things to pause and look up words for, and guess at what kind of line i’m trying to interpret (i can guess if it’s about a case, an emotional discussion, a simple ‘lets do X’ statement etc - because i’m familiar with the plot type). In a similar vein - an easier show/material to do this with, may well be a show you’ve already watched in your native language/with your native language. For all the same reasons - you will be much more familiar with the context. I could in theory watch Guardian again (which i’ve rewatched... a lot) and I would probably follow the plot very easily. But I like a challenge too much apparently, and I’d rather practice with things I can’t fall-back on my existing knowledge for as much. A show I’ve never seen has much less I can rely on for context, BUT the trade off is I can really clearly test how well i’m comprehending the plot and lines - because they are all completely new to me, so I either comprehend or I clearly do not understand what’s going on/obviously misinterpret. So it’s a very quick way for me to see if I’m achieving anything or not. Whereas if I was watching a show I already saw, I might learn new words noticably, but I wouldn’t be able to tell if I’m getting better at understanding overall plot with no english to rely on (since I already saw it before with english).

3. If you’re like me - maybe pick a show either heavy on action, or heavy on daily life. While I am familiar with case-type shows... I generally think (for me) they’re harder to follow when your existing vocab knowledge isn’t high enough to follow it... They’re big on mysteries, on plots that are actually not what they appear, and surprises. They’re big on ‘strategies’ and I find for myself, strategies are kind of hard to follow when I know less words. In contrast: if you pick a daily-life type show, you’re more likely to either know the words or NEED to know the words at some point because they’ll be useful to you. And the scenes should be relatively easy to comprehend visually even when you don’t know the words. (My caveat being - if you want the language specifically FOR understanding certain genres, by all means go for the topics you’ll actually be using - if you’re gonna read a ton of wuxia, or case-stuff etc, then go for stuff you’ll Actually Use which might well be THEM). For me... my end goal is to be able to read creative fiction, so wuxia settings and fantastical settings and mystery-words and period-words are all things I better get used to. So I haven’t really watched much daily-life stuff (although there are daily-life scenes WITHIN a lot of dramas, and I do think they’re some of the easiest scenes to follow and comprehend). 

Now, why might you pick an action-heavy show: easy to comprehend. Especially if you often watch action-oriented stuff already. The first chinese show I watched a whole episode of in only-chinese (it’s first episode, so that’s when i figured out the entire show’s set up) was The Shaw Eleven Lang (I really wanted more of Zhu Yilong’s acting in my life okay?). I DID in fact, manage to follow the plot. Without pausing much, because I was just watching it with dinner. What made it easier to follow was SO MUCH of the dialogue was really straightforward - stuff like ‘i want that sword’ or ‘i hate you’ or ‘lets eat and drink together to celebrate’ or ‘you need to go save/kill x’ or ‘do you think i’m pretty’ etc. So much of the dialogue was NOT schemes/plots/mysteries, it was really straightforward ‘we are doing X, we like Y, we hate Z’. Which for me are the sentence types I find the easiest to understand, and especially found the easiest at that point in time. In addition, because the show has so much action, often the dialogue is accompanied by action scenes that make it pretty freaking CLEAR what their objective is/what they just said. Yes, there are still plenty of unknown words to look up if you want to pause - but it should be obvious enough that you might have a decent guess at what they mean before you look them up (I had to look up words like sword, princess, clan leader, but those were pretty clear even beforehand from the context of the scenes). After I watched the first ep (which i don’t think i could even find english subs for), I watched the second ep with eng subs to see if i’d interpreted the plot correctly so far - i had. It felt pretty motivating to get through 40 minute episodes without much pausing, and know I’d followed along. I think, at least if you’re already an action-show/movie watcher, action series are going to be a relatively approachable thing to try watching in just your target language. (Another positive is a lot of verbs as commands lines, in context, so for me it’s easier to pick up new verbs, and those kind of lines are very easy to pick up in context - also lines like ‘xiao xin’ be careful, bubi, meiguanshi, danxin, ni fangxin, etc - all these short lines that are easy to understand in the context they often come up in).

 (Also, do I recommend The Shaw Eleven Lang? Well... I need to go back to watching it but uh... it’s definitely AN EXPERIENCE... with wild fighter-game-tetsuya-nomura-would-be-proud kind of costume designs, wild af scenes so far, and uh as far as i can tell Zhu Yilong’s on point to play a pretty crazy bastard in it... also there’s a LOT of genuinely kickass girls and kickass main women, which i appreciate, i believe also the main women are all 30+ which is refreshing in general in any-show tbh. also just... everyone in the show is kickass... that’s the point... its a lot like to me, if a absolutely Wild fighting game got a budget for a full drama and just went wild on the plot - very fun to watch, very bizarre... not particularly deep but like, did you play Square enix’s The Bouncer on ps2 for a Good Plot or for an absolutely wild bizarre Time? This show is like the game The Bouncer... just freaking Wild conceptually). 

And now, I am watching Handsome Siblings, and managing to get through episodes with only a little pausing for when I want to figure out specifics. It is also very action-scene heavy. At least for me, that’s been making it a lot easier to follow the gist of. There’s scenes where robbers attack - and even if I don’t know every line, its easy to figure out the gist of what’s being said. There’s scenes where people fight - again, very easy to follow. The parts I’ve been pausing the most on are the sisters plotting, because I feel that’s probably the most intensive-mystery in this plot so far, and because I want to make sure I interpret the details correctly when they’re mentioning them (since I think they’ll play out more in the plot later). I think the fact this show is Action-Heavy is making it tremendously easier for me to follow then like... me trying to watch Nirvana in Fire would be. The very straightforward action scenes are much easier to follow using visual context, at least for me, compared to dialogue heavy scenes where the vocabulary is not going to be emphazised with visuals nearly as much. (Another bonus of Handsome Siblings, at least so far, is the dialogue heavy scenes ARE accompanied by visual flashbacks to EXPLAIN the dialogue). Another bonus for Handsome Siblings: the writing seems very straightforward and decently paced. You don’t have to wait long for new scenes, for new developments, and that means a lot of dialogue and action is doing something right away and has a lot of context you immediately see result in something else. For me that just makes it... approachable and understandable in the kind of way like... movies like The Mummy were paced, or Indiana Jones, or Independence Day... do you know what I mean? It’s fun to watch even if you couldn’t understand, and the structure makes it quite comprehensible again even if you heard no dialogue at all. So for me, at least, it makes the balance of ‘ease of watching versus patience to look things up slowly’ much easier. Because its ease of watching is pretty high even for scenes where actual words-you-know isn’t high, so you can save looking-things-up for only when you WANT to, not necessarily as something you need to constantly do just to catch the gist. 

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I tried reading again - I tried reading the novel for the Sleuth of Ming Dynasty. It was BRUTAL because I apparently know NO dynasty-royalty-govt related words (which really explains why Men With Swords political scenes I know so few words lol). I got through 10 out of 39 ‘small’ pages on my phone for the first chapter. I think I managed to follow it, the grammar thankfully was really straightforward and I imagine the original author is quite talented. The difficulty was in the very common use of turns of phrase and idioms for so many parts of sentences, which were all new ‘words/phrases’ i’d never seen before.