我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

[Axon]

Thank you for this. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is on MyList with Netflix, and I Am not Madame Bovary was already on order. I know nothing about either, but I remember the former for having a run in the USA and I liked the latter just from the intriguing title. And I like the Two Guns or Two Dreamy Faces advice.

Wow, I'm pretty shocked that someone else has heard of I Am Not Madame Bovary. Excellent choice. However, I just went and watched the trailer again, and I'd forgotten that most of the main characters have heavy Jiangxi accents, like to the point where they'd probably have occasional trouble speaking with folks from the other side of China. I'd recommend starting with something more standard. If you do go ahead and study from it, it'll be a big challenge, but on the other hand you'll come away from it with a great tolerance for nonstandard speech, which is of course the norm across the entire Chinese-speaking world.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Thank you for this. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is on MyList with Netflix, and I Am not Madame Bovary was already on order. I know nothing about either, but I remember the former for having a run in the USA and I liked the latter just from the intriguing title. And I like the Two Guns or Two Dreamy Faces advice.

Wow, I'm pretty shocked that someone else has heard of I Am Not Madame Bovary. Excellent choice. However, I just went and watched the trailer again, and I'd forgotten that most of the main characters have heavy Jiangxi accents, like to the point where they'd probably have occasional trouble speaking with folks from the other side of China. I'd recommend starting with something more standard. If you do go ahead and study from it, it'll be a big challenge, but on the other hand you'll come away from it with a great tolerance for nonstandard speech, which is of course the norm across the entire Chinese-speaking world.

Thanks for the tip about the accents. The film won't work for the subs2str method because there are no Mandarin subs. Since I'm a newby, no way I could tell how accurate or how helpful they are.
But I did stumble on this, which sans Anki seems to fit the bill for the method emk and rdearman espouse . Not had the time to go through the whole thing though, so we'll see.

[Axon]

You've just gotta know where to look.

宋朝有个女子叫潘金莲
In the Song Dynasty, there lived a woman named Pan Jinlian
长得颇有几分姿色
who possessed an alluring beauty.
潘金莲的丈夫叫武大
Pan Jinlian's husband was named Wu Da.
武大有个弟弟叫武松
Wu Da had a younger brother called Wu Song
...
我跟你讲
Listen!
你这个案子
According to legal procedure,
从法律程序上
your case is already out of our hands!
我们已经管不了了
Understand?

The first excerpt matches pretty well with the English subs on OpenSubtitles. The second, thanks to the distance between English and Mandarin, expresses the same ideas but the lines don't match up well at all. More like "Your case, following legal procedure, we can't deal with it now."