What are some movies with easy to understand Mandarin Chinese?

If you want to use original material to teach Chinese, I will advice that you look into Chinese New Year movies (贺岁片). As they are mean to be very popular and largely diffused, the language they use is quite easy to understand. For example, you can try 非诚勿扰 which is a fine movie.

About transcripts, almost every Chinese movie has subtitles. You can look for subtitles files on websites like Shooter.cn

Personally, I learnt a lot from TV serials like 李小龙传奇 or 大时代 . I never did vocabulary lists but the fact that you get used to the characters and the way they talk really helps to get idiomatic expressions that every people actually use in daily life.

Also as each movie deal with one (or several) specific topic(s), there is some words that you will see again and again until you will have no way but to look them up - and then you will already know how to use them.

Last thing : watch the kind of movies that you like. Don ‘t force yourself (or your students) into boring things. Learning a language is just about understanding how you like to use it, so just enjoy ! There is lots of great things in Chinese cinema.

This text was originally published in quora.