The second wave batch of Google Wave invites was released today and I was lucky enough to receive an invite. Along with many others who have received Wave invites so far, I’ve found it difficult to evaluate or even comprehend the possibilities that Wave offers because my contacts list is currently empty. To solve this problem Google have given me 8 Wave invites to hand out.
Tag Archives: language
Google Wave for Language Study
Watch CCTV on your Mac
I missed the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Chinese Communist Party for two reasons; the first being that I was in bed, and the second being that we don’t have CCTV (China Central Television) at home. CCTV 9 (China’s official English language channel) is available worldwide. In the UK it is available on Sky as part of the package of free-to-air channels. Unfortunately we don’t have Sky TV so we are forced to try and watch online. Nice try, but unfortunately the CCTV website is very Mac unfriendly and none of the plugins required to watch the video (even with Firefox) worked. If you are on Windows you will probably have more luck.
60th anniversary celebrations aside, without access to the full range CCTV channels I was missing out on a valuable source of real Chinese language to help me learn in my quest to learn the language. I’m sure I am not alone and so I’ve put together a quick guide to watching CCTV online on any platform.
- If you haven’t got it already, download and install VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)
- From the File menu select Open Network
- Enter the URL of the channel you want to watch (see below)
- Press “Open” and wait while the video starts playing
- Press Command+F to watch in full screen
| Channel | Category | URL |
|---|---|---|
| CCTV 1 | general | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv1 |
| CCTV 2 | finance | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv2 |
| CCTV 3 | arts, entertainment | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv3 |
| CCTV 4 | international (cn) | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv4 |
| CCTV 5 | sports | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv5 |
| CCTV 6 | movies | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv6 |
| CCTV 7 | children, military, agriculture | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv7 |
| CCTV 8 | tv series | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv8 |
| CCTV 9 | internation (en) | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv9 |
| CCTV 10 | science, education | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv10 |
| CCTV 11 | chinese opera | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv11 |
| CCTV 12 | society, law | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv12 |
| CCTV News | news | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctvnews |
| CCTV Children | cartoons | ? |
| CCTV Music | music | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctvmusic |
| CCTV HD | high definition | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctvhd |
You can find more information on CCTV on Wikipdea (thanks to qimet888). If anyone knows the address of the HD streams for each of these channels or the address of the Children’s channel, please share them in the comments and I’ll update the table.
Chinese Lesson: 然后 v.s. 以后
Last Monday I tweeted the following sentence as part of my contribution to #MandarinMonday:
There are a number of mistakes in this sentence which were quickly corrected by @GraceLee0806 and others. At this point, I really should say a big thank you to all the native speakers and Mandarin teachers who help out on Twitter.
Many of these mistakes were silly and would have been caught if I had reviewed my Tweet before posting, however one mistake bugged me: I could find no explanation for using 然后 instead of 以后. And so, I did what I usually do (but don’t recommend) in these situations and skipped over it in the hope that I’d remember it again another day.
Posted in Chinese
Building a Language Learning Network
Today, students of all languages are spoilt for choice when it comes to web sites devoted to forming a language learning community. Despite all having a slightly different feel, they all build on the idea that the best (or at least most exciting) way to learn a language is by finding yourself a network of native language partners. This is the Web 2.0 contribution to language learning. On the surface of it, the combination of social networking and language learning sounds like an ideal match. The reality, for me at least, has been somewhat different.
Posted in Chinese
Mandarin Learner: Best of the Web
A relatively small collection of Mandarin-related links this week, but a good one nonetheless.
As usual, if you’ve come across something you think should feature in this weekly list, get in touch and I’ll include it in next weeks updated.
Posted in Chinese
Recent Comments