It takes a few episodes to really get into but for a military drama, it is pretty good. The characters are likable and the episodes, for the most part, can be watched independently but are enhanced by watching them from start to finish.

I\’ve seen several Chinese TV shows. Most of them I have had to force myself to watch. The quality of Chinese tv shows is pretty hard to adjust oneself to, but that show is worth the time, at least in my opinion.

Here it is:
http://www.d-addicts.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15829

http://www.d-addicts.com/forum/viewtopic_10409.htm

Check out ChinesePod. John Pasden from Sinsplice does their intermediate level podcasts. Good stuff.

They are subtitled in Chinese and English and are short enough to watch over and over again. Honestly, I would prefer to find a decent podcast since I find them more convenient (I’m in front of the computer enough already with my job). One thing I’ve considered doing is just downloading the flash movies for the episodes I’ve watched and ripping the audio to mp3.

–Brenton

案发现场 – The Chinese version of CSI. Entertaining, but I’m not sure if it’s very useful for practical study though. There is a ton of special vocab (like bullet trajectory, remains, chemical names, etc.) Interesting if you can chug through it.

新上海滩 – A remake of the classic drama starring Chow Yun Fat. It’s more produced and from what I can’t tell it’s not extremely corny.

Has anyone watched 《士兵突击》？ It’s more produced and it’s quite popular among Chinese.

Of course, with many of my suggestions you have to be careful of learning a bit of colloquial Dongbeihua with which to pepper your speech.

I do, however, fully agree with using Chinese subtitles. My experience with Chinese subtitles matches Ben’s. Incidentally, I also find using French or German subtitles when watching French or German films to be immensely beneficial.

Subtitles are an interesting topic, and you’re definitely right, any of those popular English shows can be found with Chinese subtitles. The thing is, and I would love to hear some others’ opinions on this, I don’t think watching Chinese shows with English subtitles is the best way to do it. For starters, from my own personal experience, I’ve found that watching shows for the sake of learning Chinese was not very effective when I was at a beginner or intermediate level. There was just too much I didn’t know for me to piece it all together in a pedagogically efficient fashion.

Part of the benefit of learning from a show is creating an immersion environment. If you’re going to cheat with subtitles, it’s best to do it in Chinese, so that your mind is still operating outside the realm of English.

Usually when I watch, I try my best to listen and understand the audio. If I don’t catch something (and even sometimes when I do) I rewind and look at the subtitles. I there is a word I don’t know, I look it up in google translate, but try to refrain from looking up entire sentences.

It is my belief that there are certain cognitive process which happen when one is forced to figure out the meaning of a phrase or utterance without the aide of a direct translation. (As a side note, this is also why I think electric translators are big impediment to language learning). Thus, I think using the Chinese subtitles as a crutch is a nice compromise between using the English and just going straight from the audio. If anybody else has any experience with this, please share, as I’m really only going on my own personal experience here.

Besides the lack of quality TV, or because of it, it seems there’s another big asymmetry for the English speaker learning Chinese – the Chinese content won’t be subtitled into English, whereas I’m sure Friends and Sex & The City can be found with Chinese subtitles. This makes it much less accessible for beginning and intermediate learners as a learning tool. Ideally I’d like to watch a couple of times with subtitles and then continue without, so I know what’s going on but can then rely on and focus on the spoken language for further review.