Hiya,
This post serves as a bit of a victory lap as well as to share my experience with this method of learning chinese. I’ve been learning at various paces for almost 4 years now, in general without a textbook or school. I’m a firm believer in learning the basics and then getting as much native material as possible.
Last year, my main method of learning chinese was [watching Peppa Pig](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/mp3ob1/i_just_finished_my_tenth_intensive_episode_of/) — listening, transcribing, translating, recording, reviewing flashcards. Complete and utter understanding of the content —- meant for 4-year olds, but native 4-year-olds nonetheless.
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So when my chinese roommate and I moved into an apartment last January, and he told me about [this movie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GHiFayqjtY) he wanted me to watch… I said I’d watch it if we could make sure I understood every line. He said sure, I said “I don’t think you understand how long this is going to take”. And so, here we are, Eleven months and 150 pages of dialog later. ONE MOVIE COMPLETE!
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Ultimately, this was both an effective method for learning a lot of interesting chinese and also in my opinion not as efficient as peppa pig for my level (which is unfortunately still far, far far far from fluent). Clearly, a movie meant for adults would be at a much higher level than peppa pig — there were times in the movie where entire sentences would be new words — but also where people would speak cantonese or a regional dialect or use ancient chinese. This also made it quite interesting and genuine (check out 39:20 for instance), but for me, it was often just too much, and rather than embracing the challenge and fully understanding everything, I felt myself just trying to write the words down so I could move on. The closer I got to the end, the more I felt like this. The movie eventually became an albatross around my neck that prevented me from studying in other ways — I couldn’t do those things because I still had to get through this freaking movie.
Ultimately, the year would have gone by either way, and at least it’s something added to my language corpus. [If you’re interested, I’ve got the transcription/translation up on this google doc over here.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YMLkC87SXszzJDTo-fwKzMs8xIxvO16azehDuao3xkc/edit) The translations get lazier and less complete as time goes on, but it’s a good starting point for anyone willing to take on the challenge for themselves.
In any case, it’s good to be free!
![Chinese Language Learning – [Pleco Flashcards] New HSK (11,092) / Idioms by Frequency (7,794 idioms) / PSC Wordlist (17,056 words) / & more ..](https://languagelearnerguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/iWLnsy8LDXrG_hZj832sXQNbbth3mI2PH1h7BB1a9b4-370x297.jpg "Chinese Language Learning – [Pleco Flashcards] New HSK (11,092) / Idioms by Frequency (7,794 idioms) / PSC Wordlist (17,056 words) / & more ..")
Wow, congrats OP! I’ve using a similar method but with ballads. For now it’s been 永不失聯的愛 by Eric Chou. I love this song so much and I hope one day I’ll get every line. Unfortunately the ballad’s vocab is not so useful on a daily basis but that’s ok in the moment.
How old are you? You might have time to watch the uncut Empresses in the Palace before you die…
My condolences on being confined by Peppa Pig for a year, and congratulations on finishing the film. Although watching the former might be relatively more efficient, I’d still advise you to look elsewhere — if only to maintain motivation. 喜羊羊与灰太狼 might be a productive and more entertaining avenue?
So do you mean you just rewatched the movie over and over trying to pick up new words every time until you understood every bit of dialogue to where you could enjoy it?
Congrats! Something I started doing is watching adult TV shows w/ Chinese subtitles at about 15min at a time. It’s a short enough time period that it doesn’t get overwhelming and once the time is up I can better digest what was said.