Any good Taiwanese TV programs to watch?

Hi !

I’m currently learning chinese and I’m trying to immerse myself by listening to podcasts and watching TV programs. I don’t really like Taiwanese TV shows, but I feel like I could benefit from watching the news or some talk shows.

Many of them are posted in Youtube nowadays, which is great because there’s often subtitles. Which one do you guys watch or enjoy ?

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i’m also interested in this. all the taiwanese tv shows i’ve seen made me want to kill myself but i’d love to know if there were any good ones.
the hong kong movies section on taiwanese netflix is pretty good - mandarin audio and english subtitles - lots of classics on there.

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I don’t really like Taiwanese TV either. I watch Anime, usually in Japanese, but you can always switch it into mandarin. Those voice actors talk wierd though. And There’s 木曜四超玩 on YouTube. Didn’t subscribe so I can’t speak for all, but they got some interesting episodes featuring different jobs. Dunno if they got English subtitles.

There’s a Wordpress site that links to China-made videos in a series entitled Happy Chinese, which appears to have been created for learners of Chinese. I’m not familiar with this series, but from what little of it I’ve seen, the format seems somewhat similar to that of a situation comedy. It also appears that the videos contain subtitles in Simplified Chinese characters and in English. The Wordpress site seems to provide, on individual pages on the site, transcripts (which it refers to as subtitles) of a goodly number of these videos. The transcripts are also in Simplified Chinese and English. Here’s the site:

Google Translate can convert the Simplified Chinese characters to Traditional without changing the English. At least at the time of the writing of this post, the conversion can be done with a Chrome browser on the Wordpress page itself, by right-clicking and choosing the "Translate to . . . " option.

Also, by copying a transcript and pasting it into the Google Translate site, one can convert the Chinese characters in the transcript into Hanyu Pinyin, which will show up in the lower part of the Google Translate page (it probably will be necessary to click “Show More” to see the full Hanyu Pinyin conversion). Google Translate stops at 5,000 characters, but it prompts the user to click for the next 5,000.

I hope this helps, or at least I hope that it doesn’t add to anyone’s troubles. :slight_smile:

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Taiwan Public Television Service

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thanks for that. very useful resource, i’ll definitely be adding that to my daily study schedule

I found on Netflix only a small selection of the manga/anime (wouldn’t know the difference between these two terms) could be heard in Mandarin. Most only had the original audio track available in Japanese, with Chinese subtitles. I found one with Chinese audio and tried hard to get into it, but alas the cultural barrier is just too great. I just don’t understand the appeal.

Does Taiwanese TV have actually sitcoms or sketch shows aimed at a local audience? I’d be interested in some recommendations.

The nearest I’ve seen to comedy are those terrible talk shows that okay constant sound effects.

One of my favorites. If you look on this channel there are full episodes of Aledet.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkSUQUidTop6vARcLObrRbw

EDIT: my apologies…there are no English subtitles and also mixed language. Still, great Taiwanese TV.

Like this

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I think they do, but I’m not familiar with them.

Wikipedia has a Chinese-language article on sitcoms. The article lists Taiwan sitcoms, among others. You can look for the Taiwan list down the page (the list is simply entitled 台灣), after the lists for the United States, China, and Hong Kong.

Here’s the link to the article:

情景喜剧 - 维基百科,自由的百科全书

Most of the Taiwan sitcoms in the list seem to link to their own individual Wikipedia articles.

I’m not sure which of the sitcoms in the list are still airing.

I hope this helps, or at least does no harm.

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I like to watch food TV shows

Taiwan’s 1001 stories (台灣1001個故事) is one of my favorites , Channel 51 ( EBC 東森新聞台 ), Sundays 9pm

this TV program introduces Taiwan’s traditional cuisines and their ingredients and spices. It also discloses touching stories behind the cuisines

You can check previous programs in the Youtube channel

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Taiwan Youtube is much more interesting

There’s only so many close ups of someone swallowing a dumpling I can watch :slight_smile:

Upcoming drama Tears on Fire (火神的眼淚), is the first Taiwan made fire rescue drama. It looks like it could be great.

For shows that’s already out:

The most talked about drama from 2019 is definitely The World Between Us (我們與惡的距離). https://www.facebook.com/theworldbetweenus2019/

It’s a serious court drama examining how a society should approach random killings, which seems to be some sort of a trend for sociopaths in the last couple of years.

One show I really want to watch is Island Nation 1990 (國際橋牌社). It basically a historical drama about the precarious path for Lee Teng-hui to come into power back in the 1990s, just with all the names fictionalized. The show was going to be aired on Netflix, but for some reason it got canned. However, you can find it on other streaming services.

For more lighthearted and heart warming tales, there are Yong-Jiu Grocery Store (用九柑仔店) https://www.facebook.com/YongJiuGroceryStore/

and The Making of an Ordinary Woman (俗女養成記)

Another drama that’s just been aired is called Someday or One Day (想見你). If you like romance drama, it might be the thing to watch.

Most of these shows can be found on streaming services such as Line.tv, some even on Netflix.

More upcoming shows:

If things go well, Lady the Butterfly (傀儡花) will air around the end of 2020, which is a historical drama about when America sent in an army to invade Taiwan for retribution against Paiwan aborigine’s raiding and killing of American sailors.

Also going to air sometime in 2020 is HBO’s Dream Raider (獵夢特工), which is a scifi action show.

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Has English( after a few minutes) mixed with Chinese, very funny young guy and lady (also funny). They both make lots of short films.

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Taiwan comedy tends to be very noisy/shouty already, throw in the sound effects and it becomes rather hard on the ears.

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Very nice share! Thank you :pray:

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Detention

Sounds like maybe good and interesting if you know any Taiwan culture.

On Netflix.

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I just finished watching 都嘛是你的毛 on MOD. It might be an MOD exclusive. Didn’t know that’s a thing. It’s a show about a pet communicator struggling to find his place in life. It’s surprisingly good for a Taiwanese idol TV series. It’s very short, it’s light and fun, and filled with surprisingly good pet health related information, sans all the product placements.

There is a new series based on a pet communicator called 黑貓知道 (Animal Whisper), I caught like 5 minutes of it…

I wonder what’s with all the pet communicator craze that we get two TV series with that premise within a year. Like the female lead in 都嘛是你的毛 said, I believe in science.