Learning Chinese Through Videos and Songs (Website Idea)

[taichiu727]

Hello~

 

So I have been thinking about creating a blog based website and there will be posts almost every day. The post will consist of either explanation of the subtitles of the video or the song lyrics (ex. grammar used, vocabularies, etc). There may be others things too like culture but I am not sure what you guys want the most. Also, I am not sure if there are many similar websites like fluentu. This website is intended to be a supplementary to your learning (more of a daily lesson). If you have any idea, please let me know. 

 

Some Side Questions 

 

Are you guys willingly to pay for a membership for this (will be cheap and there will be both free and premium sections) 

Do you rather pay once at all for life-time membership or pay every month? 

Are you guys learning traditional or simplified Chinese? 

Any ideas that you think would be helpful for learning Chinese that you haven't seen on websites? 

Any other suggestions? 

 

Thank you. 

[Flickserve]

I paid for fluentU, tried it, never used it afterwards. The slow interface, always needing to be online to use it and heck, the pinyin exercise really got on my nerves. (Can I repeat that about the pinyin exercises?). Why did I always have to write out the pinyin when all I am trying to do is understand what's going on? 

 

For songs, you can try but the potential market gets even smaller. Not everyone wants to or can sing a song.

 

In theory, watching a video sounds good for learning. I haven't had much benefit from watching those learning Chinese videos on YouTube. Nor other videos except to just depress me on how little I know and how hard it is to learn from a video.

[艾墨本]

I echo what Flickserve has said. Learning from videos hasn't been effective for me. Instead I use it to reinforce what I've already learned.

 

If you wanted to make your service useful, consider backpacking off of what other services offer and make the videos complimentary rather than just supplementary. For example, use a referenced video from The Chairman's Bao and provide some cultural explanation to what is going on in the video and 2-3 key grammar points along with 10 practice exercises. To differentiate paid to free, only provide the practice for the paid version. This is one way I could imagine it, but you're entering a rapidly growing market. My primary question, then, is: are you doing this for the joy of writing the blog or with the hope of turning a profit?

 

 

Are you guys willingly to pay for a membership for this (will be cheap and there will be both free and premium sections): personally, I would not pay. I prefer reading books.

Do you rather pay once at all for life-time membership or pay every month? pay one time. 

Are you guys learning traditional or simplified Chinese?  simplified

Any ideas that you think would be helpful for learning Chinese that you haven't seen on websites? More practice exercises, particularly for grammar. Some ways to practice: re-arrange the words, choose the correct placement of a grammar particle, multiple choice between several grammar particles, submitted sentences that require humans checking it for mistakes.

 

You could also reverse the process, focus on a specific word or grammar and find 3-5 examples of it in videos and movies and focus on those snippets of 20 or so seconds (context is important while learning words and grammar, not just the sentence on its own).

 

[werewitt]

This has been done several times before, for example:

https://www.learn-chinese-from-movies.com/ (looks rather dead, at least I could not get it working)

https://chinese.yabla.com/ - quite nice, it's just I'm not into learning from watching videos.