So why am I watching Chinese TV dramas? I am not studying Chinese. However, I am learning Chinese. This is my method to acquire Chinese. I call it the TV method. Following the principles of Automatic Language Growth (ALG), I am allowing the Chinese language to grow inside me.
On Wednesday, I received my shipment from Amazon China. I ordered 4 items for a total of 22 discs comprising 216 episodes in Chinese. I think it will take more than a month to watch all of it only one time each. I mentioned before about the type of box that my previous DVDs came in. One of the 4 new items used that exact box type for 5 discs. It had 2 stacks of 2 discs and 1 disc by itself, though the box has 4 areas. I guess if they wanted, they could easily stick 8 discs in that box. I mentioned before that this box type does not hold the discs securely. Well, in this item, all 5 discs are quite marred. I've checked the playability and there doesn't seem to be a problem so far. Out of the other 3 items, 2 of them don't even have boxes. The discs are in sleeves and put into a flat box sleeve. And the last one that does have a box is not a DVD box, so the discs also were in sleeves. So today I went out and bought a bunch of DVD cases for the discs.
I signed up for an account at Amazon China on March 12th and placed an order on March 14th. I payed for my order on March 17th, which I think was also the day the order was estimated to be ready. The next day, on March 18th, my order was shipped and it arrived a week later. Shipping costs seem to be calculated at 80% of the order price. I originally had ordered about twice as many items. Comparing the two orders, both were charged 80% for shipping. After the initial order placement I decided to remove the items which had the smallest discounts and keep the items which had the bigger discounts.
Now the next thing I need to decide is what to watch next. I want to watch something that I can finish up by the end of the month. Then on the 1st of next month I'll start on a new series. All of the new arrivals are quite long series. The shortest of those is 30 episodes, and if each episode is about 40 minutes which seems to be the norm, then it would take 20 hours to watch. Just so I can take it easy, I think I'm going to watch Last Agent again. It is only 15 hours long.
I just acquired some dvds, myself. Spiderman 3 dubbed in chinese is going to be the first one that i watch. The problem is that my dvd player in my laptop is busted.
ReplyDeleteI'm excited to hear what you think of these new series. It's hard to find any english-language advice about stuff that's available. I found a local store that has about a dozen series available, but i have no idea about any of them so i just started randomly.
Here is a youtube video with the opening song and scenes of Heroic Legend. Under related videos you can find some more. Oh, here is a 9-minute scene from the series. I guess you would need a playlist to watch whatever is available in the correct order.
ReplyDeleteUpdate: I mentioned above the bad quality of the discs of one the items I ordered. It turns out the last disc does have damaged areas that the DVD player is skipping over.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I've browsed Amazon China more and it appears that a majority of DVD items come in this double tall box. Most of the descriptions have the size of the product so it is easy to tell. If the length is around 25, then it will be the double tall box. A regular DVD box is about 19 cm tall. There is also a way to tell if the packaging doesn't have a box. If the package type is listed as 简装 then it is not boxed.