Heroic Legend

I finished my second viewing of Heroic Legend, a 23-hour, 35 episode Chinese TV drama. I watched it in Chinese with no subtitles, no translations, and no explanations. And I don't even speak Chinese. I am not a Chinese speaker. I do not have Chinese ancestry.


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.

heroic Chinese dramas

I checked on my online order of new Chinese TV dramas a couple of weeks ago. Since it had been 3 weeks since I had placed the order I emailed the site and asked them to investigate. I was told that one of the two dramas was out of stock so I had to replace that one with another one so I could still qualify for free shipping. Since my order was not on its way here by March 1st, I went to the local used bookstore and I was lucky enough to find another drama series that was in my price range. But before buying it I asked the store clerk to test it to see if the Japanese subtitles could be turned off or not. Since the publishing company was not the same as the other ones that I had bought before, I figured it was worth checking. I didn't want to buy another Chinese TV drama series with hard-coded subtitles and I wasn't about to buy it if that was the case. At first, the store clerk said he thought the subtitles could be turned off, but I knew he wasn't sure so I asked if they had a DVD player to try it on. Then another clerk took over the task. She put one of the discs in a player and hooked it up to a small monitor. It started playing and then she proceeded to tell me that the subtitles would have appeared in the beginning and since they didn't appear right away she took this as evidence that the subtitles were off. However, from the moment I saw the video display, no one had said anything yet. So I just waited and watched. Sure enough, as soon as someone spoke the subtitles appeared. For whatever reason, they said that player was set to show the subtitles, so the clerks then got out a used game console and played the disc from there. On that console they were able to turn off the subtitles so I went ahead and made the purchase.

I bought Heroic Legend (DVD-BOX❶ ６枚組) on Sunday, March 1st. I only bought box one at first. They had box 2 as well, but I waited until I finished the first one before buying the second half of the series. Each box has 6 discs and there is a total of 35 episodes. This drama is filmed just like a movie. It looks very good. The other ones I bought before look like TV shows, but this one feels like a movie. It looks very good at full screen as well. One of the main actors, Huang Hai Bing, is from the 2nd drama that I was watching. It's interesting to note that he looks exactly the same but he sounds very different. I felt like it was someone else's voice.

Besides the excitement of having a new TV drama to watch, the reassuring feeling I get from this one makes me feel good. This is the first time I have watched the series and there are a lot of things in it that I can understand only because I had watched the other dramas. This drama is like a testimony to me that my understanding of Chinese is growing. I can recognize all of the words, phrases and things in it that I would not be understanding if this had been the first drama that I watched. I hear them and I can say to myself, I know that word because it was in the other dramas. It is a building process.

When I watched my very first Chinese TV drama, I could say that I don't understand Chinese. But now I would say that I can understand a little Chinese. I don't feel like someone who is sitting there not following the dialog, not understanding the story, not knowing what's going to happen next. I feel like I understand enough of the words to know what to watch for next. I'm following the dialog to some extent. I'm not completely lost. I'm not only looking at the pictures. Again, this was the first time watching this series so I had no previous knowledge of what's going on, so I know that my understanding is coming from the spoken language and confirmed somewhat by what can be seen happening on screen.

I watched the first half from Sunday to Thursday and then Thursday evening I bought the second box. I finished watching it early this morning.