Last Agent

Yesterday and today I watched Last Agent, not for the last time, but for the first time. It has 22 episodes and is about 15 hours and 20 minutes long. This is the first Chinese TV drama on DVD that I've watched where nobody mentions the word "emperor." It's a modern day drama, complete with computers and cell phones. It is a drama with affairs and relationships and a conniving woman. It is very easy to get the general picture of what is going on and to generally follow the story.

It has just about every word that I have ever learned in Chinese. Well, except for "emperor." So I certainly get a lot of reinforcement by watching it. One of the words I learned from watching the 2nd drama that I bought was "hate." Of course, that word was used a lot in this drama. Hate is easy to learn. You don't need a dictionary or flashcards or an SRS. I picked up on it when one person had asked, "Do you hate me?" And the other person replied, "I don't hate you." When I first saw this situation, I knew the other words in the sentences. I also knew about the situation. I knew why the one person would hate the other. That's about all you would need to know. Of course, in reinforcing situations, a person will say, "I hate you!" and you can see the emotion.

And yes, in this drama too, somebody said one time, "I'm going to kill you!" It's surprising what kind of vocabulary gets reinforced! You can bet too, that I can say that in Chinese without hesitation. Ha ha. Hey, now I know just what to say the next time someone tells me to say something in Chinese!

This is also the first drama where nobody spit up blood. That happened quite a bit in the other dramas. An interesting thing of culture in this drama was that the people had marriage documents that were similar to passports. Each married person had one and when they got a divorce the official stamped the picture of the couple inside. It must have been a big CANCEL stamp.