Love defense wars: 爱情保卫战

Hongshu888

5 years ago

Aiqing baowei zhan is one of the first Chinese shows that I managed to understand and enjoy. While the series may not be the most intellectual TV-show ever produced, watching Chinese people bitching you still will learn a lot. The more mundane, the better. Here’s why!

Short description

Year: Since 2010
Duration: 2 x 25 min.
Nr. of episodes: 1000+
Subtitles: Chinese only
Difficulty: Intermediate / upper intermediate

Why watch 爱情保卫战?

Develop listening skills: the invited guests speak normal everyday Chinese and talk about very, very mundane problems we’re all familiar with: relationships.
It provides almost endless listening material, over a thousand episodes have been made of this Tianjin TV show.
Enhance cultural understanding: I’m always surprised by the kind of uniform and functional approach Chinese have to love and marriage. It seems most people just adapt themselves to the expectations of others, start dating someone cause that’s the proper thing to do and then when things don’t work out, they are completely at a loss. This is where TV-therapy with a live audience comes in and judgement is passed! Anyway, the viewer does get an impression of what can be expected from both sides in a relationship, what’s a healthy relationship and what’s not. The expert’s panel will point out mistakes and confront the lovers with their wrongdoings.

Same procedure, different episode

1: The show starts with a short introduction of the couple. As far as I know, it’s always a young, unmarried couple. Here you get presented the basic ingredients of the lower-middle-class drama. Both sides will outline their part of the story.

2: Then the moderator interviews them both live on stage to find out what’s not working between them. Sometimes, if he’s not careful, things can get out of hand and the lovers just start yelling accusations at each other. The audience adores this. However, the moderator usually does a good job at keeping the conversation civilized.

3: In the third and final stage, the *panel of experts* will grant their advice. Most prominently starring 涂老师 (Tu laoshi) who has been observing the couple with his sharp eyes and now offers his invaluable opinion. At the end of the show, a final countdown will be held during which the couple decides if they stay together or break up.

Tips for listening

Understanding: Don’t think less of your self because you don’t understand everything at once. It’s not about “understanding everything”, every sentence, every word.
Conversation speed: They’re speaking too fast? Try lowering the speed to 0.75. It does alter the voice quality, but this will give your brain more time to listen, read the subtitles and take in the meaning of what is being communicated.
Repetition: Listen a second and even a third time and you’ll notice your understanding will increase every time.
Active listening: Give yourself a task like looking up the meaning of 10 words. If you do so, listen first and use your dictionary only in the second round. By then you’ll have a feeling which words really stand out and are important to understand the conversation.
Summarize: Try to summarize the main problem(s) of the couple’s relationship and (even harder) the advice they were given by the “expert panel”.

This guy feels he’s wronged, because his girlfriend turns out to be a 女汉子, a masculine woman, who gets furious if she doesn’t get what she wants. She even broke his fishing rod! This gives you a taste of what’s 爱情保卫战 all about.

What’s your opinion about 爱情保卫战? Feel to free to comment.