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Today, we’re excited to announce that JinbuPal has partnered with LTL Chinese! LTL Chinese is an outstanding Chinese language school where you can take 1-on-1 or group classes to advance your Chinese skills. For today’s blog post, I wanted to share with you my own personal experience using LTL Flexi Classes.

Whether you’re working towards taking an HSK or TOCFL exam, or just wanting to improve your skills overall, LTL Chinese is a fantastic choice.

We know that most users of JinbuPal really like the benefit of being able to take control of their own learning experience, which is why LTL’s Flexi Classes are an offering we think you really might enjoy if you’re looking for some formal instruction to complement all of the Chinese characters and words you’re learning with JinbuPal. Additionally, they also offer Cantonese lessons, in case you’re using JinbuPal Cantonese and want to get some  structured lessons for Cantonese as well. Through our partnership, LTL Chinese is offering a 50% off code for the first month of Flexi Classes through JinbuPal using the coupon code JINBU50.

I wanted to try out Flexi Classes myself so that I could show you what the platform is like and what I enjoy about it, so let’s dive right in.

After signing up, the onboarding does a good job of helping you assess your current Chinese level based on either the HSK levels. For someone like me who hasn’t based my study too strictly on the exam levels, I found the detailed descriptions of each level to be really helpful. Particularly because I wanted to use the classes to work on my listening skills, which I find to be the most difficult for me out of the ACTFL skills: Speaking, Writing, Listening, and Reading. Since JinbuPal also is designed to let you break free of the HSK vocabulary, you may also find this onboarding feature to be helpful.

You can then also decide between taking a Full Course or Flexi Classes. Flexi Classes allow you to pick and choose which lesson you’d like or just change the sequence of lessons you take to suit your schedule. For me, I liked it because I could specifically pick the listening lessons that were interesting to me.

Now let’s talk about booking classes. You can book classes based on the time or based on a specific lesson itself, which I found convenient. I liked that I could look through the lesson material and even pre-listen to audio beforehand to determine if the course was at the level I wanted.

As I said above, Flexi Classes offers the option of taking Individual or Group Classes. The group classes cost only one credit and the individual ones are 3 credits. Believe it or not, since I’ve always been self-taught with my Chinese, I really preferred the idea of having a group lesson to get more of a feel for what taking of a formal lesson in Chinese is like. I also thought it would be cool to get the interaction of meeting several other learners and experiencing everyone speaking and practicing together.

However, it turned out that no one else had signed up for the classes I booked so it was just me and the instructor. Afterwards, I realized that as you are signing up, you can see listed who else has already signed up for a class so you can select lessons based on this if you’d like. Flexi Classes also offers a Discord Channel and a forum to connect with other users, so you could even make some friends through either of these networks and coordinate to take classes together if you’d like.

From my experience, I’d recommend signing up for the Group Classes if you’ve always had one on one tutoring or don’t know many other people who are learning Chinese. That way, you may end up taking an individual class anyway if no one else signs up, but you might be pleasantly surprised to meet another fellow Chinese learner along the way. You’ll also have the opportunity to take far more classes that way since group courses cost fewer credits.

Let’s talk about the lessons. Both lessons I signed up for were HSK5 group courses. While I know quite of a bit of vocabulary, a lot of the vocabulary I’ve experienced is from frequency lists like those in the JinbuPal database and content I’ve experienced from immersion with real Chinese content. As a result, there are a lot of words in the HSK6 list which I actually haven’t encountered. I figured HSK5 would be a good first level to try out, particularly for practicing my listening skills.

I took a 1 hour listening lesson that I was very impressed with. The listening content was a short authentic Chinese video which was an ad from 2021 for a Chinese tourism company. I found that this content was really expertly selected to be a good test of your listening skills because the video itself was really difficult to follow if you missed just a few words here and there. We watched the video through once and then the instructor and I went back through segment by segment to unpack the meaning of the content. Overall, it was really enjoyable content and it was interesting real world content, which if you follow and use JinbuPal, you know we find is super important for effective, sustained learning. The content was definitely challenging for me at my listening level, but not so much as to feel overwhelming.

The other lesson I took was about going to a music festival and it covered vocabulary from HSK that related to the topic. The material was all recently created content about the impact of COVID restrictions on going to music events in China. If you’re looking to learn more about Chinese culture in current times, this would be something you’d enjoy. Also, it can be helpful if you want to practice reading aloud and to get correction on your pronunciation.

Overall, I had a great experience with Flexi Classes and I mainly just wanted to show everyone an in-depth look into what the experience was like. Just use the coupon code JINBU50 to get a 50% discount on your first month.

The vast majority of Chinese video content is subtitled, but most of the subtitles are hard subtitles, meaning the Chinese characters are burned into the frame of the video. The opposite of this would be soft or digital subtitles, which are much more useful for studying because they can be copy and pasted from a transcript and they are compatible with popup dictionaries such as the Zhongwen Chrome extension. If you are unfamiliar with anything I just said, you may want to check out this blog post about must-have tools for studying Chinese on YouTube.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, what I’m going to discuss in this post is a way you can convert hard subtitles to soft subtitles. I should say that this method is definitely not bullet proof and it presents certain challenges which I’ll discuss. This post is more like a case study of my own experiences trying to do this rather than a “How To” for a fully-fledged methodology. So let’s get right to it!

If you’ve read the post I just mentioned above, you’ll be familiar with the CopyFish Chrome extension. This extension performs Optical Character Recognition (or OCR) on screenshots you take of Chinese subtitles. You set a defined area where the subtitles appear and you can easily recapture the subtitles from the same area as the video plays. However, you have to manually click the button for every subtitle you want to convert. My goal was to turn this manual approach into an automated function that can convert the subtitles for the video ahead of time, so that you will have a transcript to review while you watch it later. My thought was that I could also upload the transcript into LingQ to read along with the video and LingQ words while you watch. I also discuss this in the blog post I mentioned.

As far as automation goes, there’s a cool application I’m going to use called Auto Mouse Click. It’s free and works on both Windows and Mac. This application allows you to automate repetitive actions on your computer and set up a list of actions to loop a specified number times or for a maximum length of time. These actions are things like clicking, moving the mouse, copying, pasting and a lot more.

For this project, I had my Chrome browser, Auto Mouse Click, and an Excel spreadsheet all open on my screen. I won’t go into a ton of detail here, but I determined every action required to convert a subtitle, paste it into Excel and then start the loop again ready to receive the next output. I had to pause the video temporarily after each conversion because the processing time for the OCR is longer than the time between subtitles. I also found that I could record the playback timestamp for each subtitle by right clicking the video and selecting “Copy Video URL at Current Time”. This is something I experimented with pasting into my Excel spreadsheet as well. I imagine this could be used eventually to generate an actual CRT subtitle file as an output from the automation.

The advantage of using an Excel spreadsheet instead of a Word document is that I inevitably had a lot of duplicate subtitles converted if the timing wasn’t quite right for the video changing to the next subtitle. So after completing my automation, I could easily select all lines of data and click “Remove Duplicates” to correct for this.

I’d recommend you check out the video version of this post so you can see how the automation looks when it’s running. I set this loop to run for a maximum time by multiplying the video runtime by 3. This was based on the pausing time between each subtitle I had set up earlier.

In the future, I’d like to set up a way to share the Auto Mouse Click file with you so you can try this yourself. But it’s a bit tricky to explain what you have to do to use the file, so I don’t want to waste the effort if there isn’t enough interest out there. So, if you really want the file to do this yourself, make sure you go to the video at the top of this post and hit the Like button on that video, because I will share the file and a tutorial for using it if this video gets more than 200 likes.

Regarding the challenges I mentioned earlier, the OCR computation you get with this is not perfect and it can be thrown off if the background is too similar in color to the subtitles. Sometimes the output is wrong even when the background has good contrast. Also, YouTube will occasionally place an ad popup on the screen exactly where the subtitles are. This is something you would miss if you walked away while running the automation on a long video. You would come back to your computer and find that all the output data was wrong after the ad appeared because these pop-ups don’t go away unless you close them out. Also, some videos have ads in the middle which might through off your transcript if the ad has subtitles as well. But despite all these challenges, I think this technique can definitely help with studying and I’m sure I can improve upon on the method for better error checking in the future.

Good luck using this method yourself. If you’ve used other ways to tackle this problem, we’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment below!

Hey everyone! This will be a quick blog post today, but I just wanted to give a shout out about a recent interview David and I had with Nina of the Nina_pf YouTube channel regarding JinbuPal. Check out this video to hear David and I discuss more about our motivations for starting JinbuPal and our future plans as JinbuPal continues to grow. Nina has been focusing her YouTube channel on providing awareness to language learners about newly developed applications for language learning in general. If you want to be in the know about up and coming language learning apps and resources, I’d encourage you to keep an eye on Nina’s channel as she works with other app developers in the future. Enjoy!

One great way to improve your Chinese skill level is to drastically increase the amount of language input you receive through both intensive and extensive reading. We have several other blog posts which discuss online tools that you can used to scaffold your Chinese learning, such as pop-up dictionaries and reading apps. However, it’s helpful to have a physical copy of a book you would like to read so that you can take it with you on-the-go if you’ll be out in the sun, at the beach, or just if you want to give your eyes a break from your screen. Amazon is a great place to find such books, so this short post is going to show you have you can find a book that interests you.

First of all, run a Google search for “Amazon Simplified Chinese books” or “Amazon Traditional Chinese books.” This will take you to the main page for books in Chinese. Here are the links for simplified and for traditional books on Amazon.

Once on this page, you can search for books by categories on the left menu pane and try to find something that interests you.

If you want to look for the Chinese version of a specific popular book, you can try that too. If a Chinese version is available, searching the title and “Chinese edition” will usually do the trick.

If you would like to be able to search from a wider selection, another option is to buy a book directly from China through JD.com. I recently wrote another blog post about how to order books from JD.com. The shipping can be expensive from China, but sometimes (especially after registering a brand new account) JD.com will give you a coupon for shipping fees which can make a book purchased from there almost half the price as ordering from Amazon. JD also offers big discounts annually on June 18^th (“618”), so it’s always worth checking to see what deals you might be able to get on this day and in the weeks leading up to it.

Obviously, you’ll need to know quite a few characters and words to hit the plateau where reading a physical book is more approachable. We recommend using JinbuPal to build up your skills with at least 80% of characters by frequency so that you can start approaching reading physical books without it feeling too daunting. So if you’re not at that point yet, keep working away on your JinbuPal account and you should be on your way to approaching this sort of content soon! But it doesn’t hurt to go ahead and pick out a book that you would enjoy reading, this can help you to get confident in seeing how many characters you already know, by scanning through and trying to sound at all the characters you’ve learned. 加油！