The new TV show — I like it. It is based on the work of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who lives in Berkeley. It is a new sort of reality show. It isn’t a 50% reality show (as most reality shows are), it is a 10% reality show. Perhaps 10% of the show involves discussion and illustration of actual research. You learn about it painlessly.
When I was in college, I tried to learn about stuff by finding fun-to-read books on the subject. Genetics, for example. TV was worthless. Educational TV (opera concerts, televised lectures) was dreary and ordinary TV was completely non-educational. Since then, the gap between educational TV and ordinary TV has narrowed a lot: the History Channel, the Food Channel, the Weather Channel, not to mention Frontline, are moderately entertaining and Top Chef and Survivor are mildly educational. But it is still easy to put all these shows on one side or other of the education/entertainment divide.
Lie to Me bridges the gap. Although meant to be seen as entertaining, it’s undeniably educational. I wish there was an entertaining show I could watch to learn Chinese. There isn’t even an entertaining book!
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Buy direct sat tv
I’ve been in Taiwan for 11 years. I’ve found soap operas to be really good for learning Chinese. They mainly focus on relationship, work, money and everyday problems – lots of repetition and useful phrases and words in easy to follow narratives. Radio call in shows on personal problems are great, too.
I don’t know about China, but in Taiwan all TV shows have Chinese subtitles [to promote literacy and for those who speak Taiwanese better than Mandarin] – so you can also speed up your reading and train your brain to hold the unknown phrases flashed on screen long enough to note them down to look up later.
As for entertaining books, well, it depends on what you find fun, but I think the dictionary at zhongwen.com would interest you – available both online and on paper.
You might be interested in a language game called “Where are your keys?” which is purported to make it relatively easy (and fast) to gain fluency in a language. There’s not much information about it currently available, but there is a podcast intereview with one of the creators available here:
https://www.mythic-cartography.org/2009/03/04/episode-23-where-are-your-keys-an-interview-with-evan-gardner/
The article says at the end of section 4:
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I said, ‘Look, Clinton’s got this way of rolling his eyes along with a certain expression, and what it conveys is “I’m a bad boy.” I don’t think it’s a good thing. I could teach him how not to do that in two to three hours.’
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So it is possible to learn how to fool a face-reader? Maybe we should not take this _too_ seriously. Or maybe it will result in a really good episode of Lie To Me.
Thanks for writing about this! I had only heard it mentioned in passing, and I dismissed it as just “another crime drama I don’t have time to watch”.
In terms of creating effective educational/entertaining TV, the challenge, I think, is relative to the subject matter. For instance, why haven’t people been able to come up with ways to entertain while educating about math. Most entertaining shows throw around jargon, mystify, or even worse, give people the false impression that they understand what’s going on—enough to dismiss mathematics but not enough to appreciate it.
There is the PBS show NUMB3RS, which does an okay job. Still, I hear people dismiss it seemingly it contains math.
I’ve downloaded all the Lie To Me episodes and I’ve never had the desire to do so before now. This show rocks! The right actors were put in place perfectly — Tim Roth is fantastic and so is Kelli Williams is a favorite (I’ve tried to catch all her movies and TV series). Brandon Hines (I’d love to hear him sing on the show!) and Monica Raymund are believable and well chosen. But the episode on April 1st had too much drama between the main characters — the ex-wife, the argument between Ria and Eli, then there is Jillian’s husband’s issues (which has been a good side story but not with all the other downfalls of the characters) and then add in the main story line and all of it gets jumbled. If it proceeds like this I will not continue with what I thought would be my favorite ever series. The writers blew it on that episode or they just decided to throw everything in the scripr and it didn’t fly smoothly or well.