Introduction
I’ve been learning Chinese for 2+ years. My method of studying it is somewhat unorthodox. Rather than textbooks, Duolingo, or private lessons, I’ve been following a different approach: learning every single word from a TV show about a board game.
Why do this? Has it worked? Read along and find out!
My approach
I quite enjoy playing the board game 围棋 (Weiqi, or Go). I wanted to watch the TV show 棋魂 (Qi Hun), which is a drama about a kid possessed by a 1000-year old ghost. It features Weiqi quite heavily—the ghost turns out to be the best Go player of his time, and persuades the kid to take up the game.
Look at how happy they are playing Weiqi!
Anyway, I wanted to watch this show in Chinese. But where to start? How could I learn the words and grammar that I would need to understand the show? I built a website called Hanzimatic that would keep track of the words that I know, and would teach me new sentences from the show that contained only one new unknown word each time. I can paste the subtitles of each new episode into Hanzimatic, learn the words and sentences, and understand the episode perfectly afterwards—at least, that’s the idea!
The detour into Peppa Pig
Turns out Qi Hun is quite hard to understand with not much Chinese knowledge. Hanzimatic started off unable to find me many interesting lines of dialog that would only introduce one unknown word.
To solve this problem, I turned to the favorite TV show of language learners everywhere: Peppa Pig! This show is on Youtube dubbed in Chinese. I could download the subtitles and use Hanzimatic to learn simple sentences such as “乔治，你需要吃蔬菜。” (“You need to eat vegetables, George.”)
Look at how happy they are playing checkers! They’ll get around to Weiqi eventually.
After enduring a few episodes of piggy grunts (“哼哼” in Chinese, if you were wondering), I was ready to get back to Qi Hun.
New words each time
Hanzimatic was able to extract over 500 sentences for me to learn just from the first episode of Qi Hun. After studying these over six weeks, I could watch the episode and understand it with a bit of pausing and subtitles. Exciting!
Subsequent episodes took less time to learn:
After studying for about a year, I’m on episode 19 / 36 of Qi Hun, and I extract about 120 new sentences out of each episode. It’s been very encouraging to see the pace accelerate–it takes me about 2 weeks to learn all of the words in each new episode now.
Does it work?
Is this the most efficient way of learning Chinese? Probably not. If I was being efficient about it, I’d learn the more frequent everyday words first. Yesterday I learned the idiom “深不可测” meaning “unfathomable depths”: probably not the most useful word when I still haven’t learned words like “外头” (“outside”). But, it’s more fun; I look forward to finishing all of the new words for an episode so that I can watch it. I can also learn words related to the topics that I’m interested in: learning Chinese words for Weiqi terms is more interesting than other topics.
After studying the flashcards that Hanzimatic generates, I have a pretty good chance of following the plot in each new episode. And if the word “深不可测” comes up, I can understand what it means and keep watching, without having to pause to look up the word.
The most important thing for me is keeping it interesting and finding a routine that I can keep up every day, and this one definitely does it for me.
Onwards
You, too, could try this approach to language learning! Hanzimatic is available for everyone to use. If you don’t have a TV show that you want to learn all the words for, don’t worry—it will give you sentences of its own choosing if you don’t upload any material. Contact me at [email protected] if you have thoughts!