OMG Game-Changer! (Chinese TV) (Patreon)

Dude! The guys who brought you iSakura (Japan Net TV) have recently released a new service that allows you to watch HUNDREDS of channels of real, raw, live Chinese (HK, Taiwan and Mainland) TV channels and it is too awesome for words.

As usual, they offer low-cost three-day trials for only three bucks.

AJATT really is the TV method. Next to SRS, nothing is more powerful for language acquisition. TV is the GOAT, the greatest language learning tool of all time, and SRS plus dictionaries atop that simply make you invincible.

In the past, I have jokingly given the title of “TV” to YouTube (mostly to poke fun at myself for overwatching it) but even YouTube doesn’t compare to TV, in no small part because the YouTube mixing algorithm sucks — you watch ONE “Vice” video ONE time and thereafter it’s nothing but drugs and conspiracy theories up in your recommendations. MFW?!

Good old TV is the perfect balance of focus and diversity. Not too much diversity like YouTube search results, and not autistic hyperfocus like YouTube autoplay. Cartoon Network Taiwan will give me Chinese-dubbed cartoons all day, but it will give me different shows and subgenres of cartoons; it won't play Aqua Teen Hunger Force (Number One In The Hood, G) for 24 hours, nor will it show me stuff from a different channel I binge-watched yesterday, nor will it veer off into anti-Semitic snuff films: I'm serious, YouTube...needs help. WT-actual-F. You know what? Here's MY conspiracy theory: Google already has artificial general intelligence (human-level AI) but they choose to make YouTube mixing suck in order to calm down the masses! (lol)

Coming back to Chinese TV: after the breakdown of my old Chinese Android TV box that I got at a shady overseas Chinatown, I went into exile on YouTube. Now, back watching real TV, I am struck by the extent to which Internet content isn’t “true” content but meta-content: content about content. Review. Commentary. Pointers.

To wit, Amazon is nothing but a site about books (and other products). Twitter is minutiae about minutiae. Google is a database of links to other links. Most of YouTube is commentary and digest of deeper, more authoritative, non-free content. Playing YouTube all day is akin to binging on train station basement department store food samples. Fun and strangely unsatisfying (and not in the sense of inducing guilt). #ShibuyaEkiWhereYouAt

And who am I to cast stones? Even the AJATT site itself is about Japanese but contains very little Japanese (outside of AJATT Plus). And that’s fine; I can hardly fault people for doing what I also do, but it’s not even close to a 360-degree, three-dimensional view of reality.

Linguistically speaking, TV, as fake as it is, is realer than the Internet — even realer than your favorite “real and raw” YouTuber. Don’t get me wrong, they have a place, too (video game Let’s Play vids are amazeballs). But YouTube is just a different kind of fakery. And I say that as a big fan of the platform.

Finally, editing. I definitely feel like TV is edited in a such a way as to brainwash us. This is bad for you as a voter and consumer, but great for you as a language acquirer. On YouTube, editing, — if it happens at all — is just made to look cool or “professional”; they’re still amateurs: they’re middle-schoolers “adulting” by smoking cigarettes and wearing makeup. The virtuosity is still skin-deep.

TV uses moving images, still images, voice, text, previews, commercials in such a powerful cocktail. And you can switch channels, but you can’t just skip to the next show (ignore recordings for a sec), nor do you control the scheduling. That lack of choice is great from a language acquisition perspective because it’s forced immersion continuity. The forced scheduling also exposes you to (repeating myself here, but worth it) more diversity.

New media, as represented by YouTube, is on the rise, and deservedley so. At the same time, it behooves us to recognize the fact that new media is rising not because of but despite its content. New media’s true strength is its superior conveyors (delivery systems). Simply put, new media is more convenient to access, and convenience is destiny. If the American continents had been conveniently within reach of the rest of the world, their human and natural histories would have been totally different.

Even within new media itself, convenient conveyance conquers quality content. Netflix’s content is superior to YouTube’s, but its navigation sucks, so I basically never watch it, even though my friend gives me free access and my own sub-account.

Now that I can watch live Chinese cable and satellite TV on my Android tablet (no TV set or set-top box needed), the game has once again changed. Game on!

Anyway, typing from a phone here, so more links and other metadata (lol) later!