Cartoons

Hello everyone. I'm gonna be talking about what I've been doing in the past few days. Because I want to increase my Chinese listening proficiency I've been watching a lot of cartoons actually and it's actually quite useful. Because cartoons have a more simple storyline than movies, like if you want to watch Inception or something in the language you're learning, that might be more difficult. So I've been watching cartoons in Chinese, with Chinese audio and Chinese subtitles, not all of them have subtitles but all of them are dubbed in Chinese and I'm finding this is very useful. In two areas it's particularly useful. One is I'm able to know how to express myself in Chinese better now because often we say, "oh I don't know how to express myself in the language" but once I started watching the cartoons, they have a very...they speak in very spoken language, so I was able to think "oh, that's how someone expresses themself in Chinese" and I used that and surprisingly my Chinese actually became very good, like the day after I talked to my mom and then I said wow, I speak more naturally and I'm not even trying very hard, it's very natural. The other thing is it's really helped me locate some words that I've wanted to learn. I know one of my weaknesses is knowing how to describe things, so descriptions or emotions or feelings, I don't know a lot of those, only the basic ones but I've found in cartoons, they have a lot of those words, so that's very helpful for kind of everyday expression. Another thing I noticed with the cartoons is that the more simple storylines tend to be where animals are the main character so Bambi, the Lion King, for example, these tend to have an easier storyline. The ones where they have people as the main character such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, they have more, a little bit more, it's a little bit more difficult to understand but I think they're certainly easier than understanding movies so I think even if you don't understand what's being said in the language, just watch something. Try watching a cartoon in the language you're learning, don't watch, if you're a Chinese speaker, don't read Chinese subtitles and it's preferable if you don't have English subtitles either. Try to watch a movie with absolutely no subtitles. There's tons of TV shows and movies online, I'm sure you can find. Try it and let me know how it goes, tell me how it is. OK, bye.