This table lists 210 tv series and 62 movies in Chinese, ordered by required vocabulary. Click P (Pleco) or A (Anki) in the vocab column to download flashcards.

Tools

Pleco is a free dictionary app for Chinese, available on iOS and Android. Flashcard functionality is available as an in-app purchase.

Anki is a popular flashcard application, available on many platforms.

Language Reactor is a free extension for Chrome. It provides several useful features for working with subtitles on Netflix and YouTube.

Vocabulary Lists

The Basic1k list (P A) covers the most common 1000 words used by more than 90% of all shows in the list. Those words cover around 75% of all content and are excluded from the individual vocabulary lists and statistics.

Click the link in the words column to get a vocabulary list which covers all the remaining words used in the corresponding show. The words in the list are in the order of appearance in the show, each word is only listed once at the time it first appears. The last column in the vocabulary list contains the total amount of times the word appears.

Definitions and Pinyin are taken from CC-CEDICT. All provided vocabulary lists are text files, either Pleco format (P) or Anki format (A).

Note: Since automatic word segmentation is not perfect, the lists might contain odd words and some words might be missing.

Word Metrics

Words

The total number of unique words that a show uses indicates how many words you have to learn in order to understand the whole show. This obviously also depends on how long the show is.

Words per hour (w/h) (w/h 4h)

The number of new, unique words a show introduces per hour (w/h). Naturally, the number of new words is highest in the beginning of a show. For a better comparison of shows with different lengths use the (w/h 4h) metric which only considers the first four hours of each show.

Contact

In case you find any errors on the website or in the vocabulary lists feel free to contact me via email.

I'd be happy to add more shows to the list. If you have subtitles that you'd be willing to share please send me an email. The format would have to be a text based subtitle format, either in simplified or traditional, ideally both.