Good Taiwanese TV shows

Hey everyone, I’m looking for TV programs that are watchable so I can better my listening ability. I have cable TV but I usually struggle to find anything worth watching. At the moment it is all Sponge Bob Square pants and the dubbed Animal Planet shows.
So if you can recommend a TV show that is decent please do and also let me know what time and channel it can be found on.

Thanks.

You’d be better off listening to your neighbors jabber on. Taiwanese TV will slowly drive you insane and suck the very life force out of you leaving you listless and unable to attend any classes or continue studies, it will rob you of your vitality, it will destroy your thought process and reasoning, it will make you want to tune out the entire island and every time you hear noise from a television, you will shudder in disgust.

not worth it.

Shows on PTS are okay for your stated purpose. PTS is like PBS in the USA.

The dramas on other stations often are beautifully shot, with beautiful actresses. The plots tend to be incredibly ridiculous, so I watch them with the sound turned down.

DD is right about the brain melting effects of Taiwan TV. Some scholars blame part of the irrationality of Mainland China on the KMT broadcasting shows across the strait as a means of psychological warfare before the end of martial law. However, I will make an exception and recommend one of my personal favorites. The show is called “女人我最大”, which translates to something like “I am woman hear me roar”. Anyway, it’s an hour long show on cable channel 42 “TVBS” and shows during the week at 1 and 9pm. It’s dedicated to women’s fashion (clothes, makeup, accessories). It has cute girls that try on clothes and let people put makeup on them. It has gay men who dedicated their lives to making girls look girly. I find the speech of throaty-voiced gay Taiwanese men to be particularly relaxing to listen to, and even therapeutic. The awkward close-up facial posturing of the girls modeling the makeup is pleasant to the senses as well

Sounds like a great show. I don’t like that they stole my old pickup line for their title, though.

Curiously, several TV shows do, in fact, simply involve a panel of people-who-look-like-your-neighbours jabbering about vacuous wibble, the only minor difference being the presence of a couple of hosts listening to them and pretending to actually give a shit.

王子的約會

I find 爸媽冏很大 quite interesting sometimes. It’s a public television show about parent-child relationships where they get a bunch of parents and their kids to come in and talk about a particular issue, like parents pressuring their kids to break up with a significant other or whether it’s OK for kids with advanced degrees to do manual labor. The one annoying thing about it is the way the panels go “ehhhhhh??!” every time something surprising is said. But if you’re looking for a show that will help you improve your Chinese, I’d say this one’s a good bet. I think the English title is “About Sex”.

When I first got cable here, I was SO excited! I thought for sure it would help my Chinese!

But then…I began to try and watch Taiwanese tv…it is the worse and most worthless crap in the world! The only thing worth watching are the Buddhist shows…but those tend to be boring and I know all those words already.

So now its Nat. Geo and AXN mainly.

Seconded. This is seriously the only show I’ve seen in Taiwan where I’ve actually made an effort to tune in each week. Not quite as good as the UK version, but still pretty fun and interesting, especially when a foreigner appears as a “Prince” and tries to get a date!

Also when watching during broadcast on Saturday night, you can follow a kind of live commentary on the shows FB page, where viewers comment under each male contestants photo. These comments are useful, as I’m constantly finding interesting words and slang that I’ve never seen in textbooks:

facebook.com/TakeMeOutTaiwan

Naturally all previous shows are available on youtube if you want to catch up.

Dubbed Korean dramas are the way to go.

Good Taiwanese TV shows… Talk about oxymorons, ha. But if you’ve gotta watch it, I’d
say go with the news. As long as you look at it as entertainment (and it’s much more entertaining
than what passes for “entertainment” here) and not real news, you’ll be fine. They sort of
talk about stuff that happens sometimes, so you can learn a reasonable range of vocabulary.
It’s also fun tosee how the different channels spin a given news item based on their political
affiliation,i.e. TVBS (Channel 55, Blue) vs. Sanli (Channel 54, Green). Or, if nothing else, you
can learn what’s hot on YouTube at the moment.

Thanks for the suggestions! I find that the news is perhaps a little to fast for me. But maybe I should just keep listening until it gets better. Other programs are okay though. I just find the speed of the news a little too much.

Be warned, a lot of the Chinese used on tv is slang or mixes in Taiwanese words or weird local references.
Unfortunately the news subtitles do the same thing using made up words or edited versions of Chinese. Radio is a better way to learn s they are not so hyped put asking over each other.

You can check this out

funshion.com/subject/play/73903/1

Very popular Korean drama from a few years ago called “The First Wives Club” in English. Dubbed in Chinese with traditional subtitles. It’s on network TV here and I started watching about episode 45, now up to 80. As pathetic as it is to say, it’s like the highlight of the day when it comes on. You love some characters and want to punch others in the face, which is probably why it’s so compelling. I don’t know what the early parts are like though.

Its a bit off topic, but I would like to get American movies and change the language into chinese. Does anyone know where I can download these. When I was studying German, I just got the english movies I had seen a million times and change the language. But here in Taiwan it seems to be mostly subtitles??

Oh man, I I’m afraid there’s no good tv shows out there in Mandarin.

Everything produced here are some form of reality talk show… Talk show about politics, finance, d-list celebrities interview, cooking, and paranormal activities. Singing/dancing contests. Anything with a script is either in Taiwanese or Korean drama dubbed in Chinese.

I swear 95% of the TV content here can be podcasts and you wouldn’t miss a thing, it’s horrible. It’s just people chatting about random shits.

I don’t know where to download them… however you can try DVDs. They stopped dubbing movies for a while since it is corny and people hated it. Only kids movies gets dubbed with Chinese voice actors now (since kids can’t read Chinese subtitles that quickly). So go to a local dvd rental and rent some Disney movies?

I used to watch “Cien Mexicanos Dijeron…” when I was hanging out with my Guatemalan friends, and I started watching it alone after the host mentioned that other Spanish students were watching the show for supplemental practice. That show (which I think is called “¿Qué Dice la Gente?” now) is a knock-off of “Family Feud.”

I wish that there were similar game shows in Taiwan or Mainland China. I haven’t found one yet (but also don’t watch much TV, even in English). So far I’ve only seen that show where some middle-aged lady forces Taiwanese fifth-graders to answer multiple-choice English questions to which all of the answers are incorrect.

Thanks for the help, I checked out 王子的約會 on youtube, and there is a lot of it up on there. It’s pretty entertaining, the host is reasonably funny. The women picking apart the men can be a good laugh and there aren’t any slide whistles either. It’ll keep me busy for a while.