Studying Chinese, again

After finishing up the class at the Boston Language Institute in April, I figured I'd take a short break from studying. The class was a good kick in the ass to really work on my vocabulary and (lack of) conversation skills, but after two months I was pretty drained. Plus, Faith, my language exchange friend (really, informal tutor, since I really didn't feel like I was helping her all that much with her English), was taking a long trip to visit family back in China. Taken together, the motivation to study dropped off considerably.

It also seemed like a good idea to take a break and give my brain a rest. From language study, at least. Work had been heating up, and it really felt like most of my head was filled up with new vocabulary rather than the new (old) design I was supposed to be debugging.

I figure I'd take a few days off and then get back into it. Maybe a week or two, or at least as soon as the project calmed down. (I'm pretty sure it was only supposed to be two weeks or so.)

Two weeks. Yeah. It was two weeks, and then the next week, it was still two weeks. And the week after that... That lasted for about two months, actually.

So anyway, I'm finally studying again. It probably didn't hurt that I got an email from Faith that she was back and wondering when we wanted to meet. So I'm listening to the audio CDs in the car and reviewing flash cards and reading through chapters in the textbook again. It doesn't feel like a routine yet, but hopefully I'll get there.

It's definitely harder to buckle down when the weather's nice out and I've got disc in the evenings, and the weekends are all full. Your basic overplanned summer. But I have come up with one study trick that I feel like I'm going to be able to stick with...

I'm watching Chinese kung-fu movies.

Videos are alright in the short term, but it really is all about the DVDs because you can select the language track as well as easily disable (and enable) the subtitles. I'm not confident enough to get to that point yet, but I figure I'm going to experiment with that soon enough. I originally tried this with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon when I first got the DVD. I guess it's a testament to the quality of its subtitles that I thought I really understood what was being said until I actually turned them off.

The library is great for renting DVDs and videos. And a dollar for a weekly rental (and the ability to reserve a movie) is hard to beat. Unfortunately, the selection of Chinese films, while better than expected, still isn't that great. But it's still a great resource that we highly recommend. Plus, they've got a searchable catalog that's plugged into the regional library network. Also cool.

We did find a decent selection at the new Hollywood Video that recently opened in Waltham, but unfortunately, a several of them only have English-dubbed tracks which I can't understand. (They're also kinda expensive.) I've discovered the same problem with many of the DVDs offered on Amazon.com. I suppose with the recent rise in interest in old kung fu movies, there's been a rush to re-release a bunch of the classics in the same format that many of us remember watching on TV on weekend afternoons.

But as much as I fall into that crowd that fondly reminisces about those poorly dubbed action spectacular, I remember that the whole point is to get more material that I can (watch and) listen to in Chinese.

In some ways, it's a little weird, because in most cases, the original dialog is actually in Cantonese. So I'm still watching a redub. But somehow it doesn't seem as bad as the English dubbing. I mean, at least there more vocabulary and syntax in common. Still, I keep wondering how accurate the dubbing is. I tried poking around on the web to see if there were some native speakers that had an opinion on the subject, but I couldn't find anything. It'd be nice if I could just ask my parents, but it would require them to watch both versions of a given movie and then give me the rundown and frankly, I don't think they'd pay that much attention to the differences. You definitely need a net geek to do the proper in-depth nitpick.

For now, I'm just running with it. I bought a bunch of movies on Edaymovie.com and were pretty happy with them: good selection of DVDs with the original Cantonese and dubbed Mandarin tracks, prompt delivery and good prices. I just put in a second order which included the classic 36th Chamber of Shaolin (also known as Shaolin Master Killer). I'm also branching out and trying to get some more contemporary films, since vowing vengeance after the death of your master seems to have somewhat limited application. (perhaps a reverse of the Korean brother in Better Off Dead that spoke like Howard Cosell)

Anyway, I've found some sites that have been helpful in selecting additional film titles. LoveHKfilm.com has provided excellent overviews and reviews of many of the films. And when I couldn't find info there, I stumbled on hkmdb.com which has been a mixed bag. It's more of a central repository for people to submit plot summaries and reviews, so the quality varies greatly depending on who cared enough to enter a submission.

As far as other on-line stores, I'm also going to check out acmemovie.com which is the only site that I've found so far that carries copies of the elusive Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain that have the necessary DVD region encodings, picture format (NTSC versus PAL) and language/subtitle tracks. YesAsia.com seems to be a Asia-centric Amazon wannabe, but it's mostly region 3 (South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and region 6 (China).

Speaking of "Zu," it was interesting to discover a whole controversy associated with it's U.S. release (or lack thereof). The SOOTTAD and I saw a preview for it sometime last year at the Belmont and were pretty psyched about seeing it once it came out. But it never did and we eventually forgot about it. Something similar apparently happened with Shaolin Soccer as well. I hadn't really thought about the movie recently, but I remember the buzz when the trailer showed up online (was it atomfilms.com?), and we did get a chance to see it when someone from my tai chi class brought in the DVD.

It turns out that they both figure into a greater issue of the release of successful Hong Kong movies in the U.S. -- and apparently an issue with Miramax/Disney in particular. It's all kind of a bummer and has me just a bit worried about the pending release of Hero. I won't go into the details here since this is already getting pretty long, but if you're interested, you should check out the Web Alliance for the Respectful Treatment of Asian Cinema. (Oh, and I just found this open letter to Miramax.) Here's also an article on the (non-)release of Shaolin Soccer which I found in this post while I was trying to find information on the Mandarin versus English dubbing of Cantonese spoken language films. ...which was unsuccessful, but did turn up this paper on teaching ESL using subtitled broadcasts of the X-files.