In LA

“But how will we attach the fake xiăo jī jī to Butters’s chin?”

Tonight we watched some episodes of South Park and discovered the best way ever to learn and practice reading Chinese. The method is as follows:

1. Turn on the Chinese subtitles.
2. Hit play until a subtitle appears, then pause playback.
3. Scrutinize the subtitles carefully, and look up any unrecognized characters in a dictionary.
4. Practice reading the sentence several times.
5. Repeat steps 2 through 5 until you’re too tired to go on.

I think South Park episodes are great for this. The language is very common speech, the dialogue is repetitive and reinforces characters learned in the previous line, the paused graphics are engaging (it’s like looking at a page from a childrens’ book), and I find the show to be entertaining even when paused and even if I’ve already seen the episode.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Amusing, Chinese language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.