What is this guy saying?

[thph2006]

Can someone help me interpret this probably very simple snippet of dialog from the Making Connections Listening Comprehension CD? The complete dialog is a man and woman talking about family. The man is consoling the woman who's homesick. At the risk of total embarrassment I'll offer what my ears are hearing in the snippet:

刚来我想看得黝黑很想家。

gāng lái wǒ xiǎng kàn déi yǒuhēi hěn xiǎngjiā 。

The part I really don't understand is "看得黝黑" (or whatever it is he's really saying).

Here's a link to the product on Amazon for anyone interested:

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Connections-Listening-Comprehension-Simplified/dp/0887273661/sr=8-5/qid=1172276834/ref=pd_bbs_sr_5/002-7371301-4663208?ie=UTF8&s=books

MC1-02-Family-Snippet.mp3

[elina]

It’s: 刚来我想肯定会很想家

[thph2006]

ARRRGGGHHHH! (Please picture me kicking myself).

Thank you Elina. It seems so obvious now, yet no matter how hard I tried I could not hear it correctly. I think part of the problem is I've never heard the word 肯定 before, but I also find that once my ear hears something one way (usually the wrong way) it becomes almost impossible to hear it any other way until someone kindly corrects me.

I see you have a Mandarin learning products website. Maybe you can suggest some other listening comprehension CDs for me.

Thanks Again!

[elina]

At the risk of total embarrassment I'll offer what my ears are hearing in the snippet

I think there’s no embarrassment at all when learning a foreign language, I am the same with you. As a Chinese native speaker, many times I can understand each English word, but with my poor listening skill, when people say them in a Sentence, I’m just lost！

I see you have a Mandarin learning products website. Maybe you can suggest some other listening comprehension CDs for me.

See here:

Excellent Listening Course

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/846-excellent-listening-course

For Adults-->Listening

http://www.lovemandarin.com/class.asp?fid=265&sid=287&tid=0

For Adults-->Listening and Speaking

http://www.lovemandarin.com/class.asp?fid=265&sid=291&tid=0

[anonymoose]

Does that first course you mentioned come with CDs, or is it only with cassettes?

I've tried looking for it in many bookshops, but none of them (even the larger ones) seem to have it.

[necroflux]

Listen, don't feel bad at all - you'd be surprised at how much of our "listening ability" in our own native languages is actually based on context. We don't need to hear every word clearly to guess with amazing accuracy what is actually being said. That is coming from the perspective of having a grasp on the entire sphere of a language, so the brain is capable of just eliminating thousands of options to provide for that educated guess.

When learning a new language, OTOH, you are starting from scratch. Thus you must explicitly understand every last word, and slowly put them together, to come up with meaning. As you progress, slowly more and more phrases will become "automatic", for example when someone says "bu zhidao 不知道" really fast, and it comes out something like "bu 'erdao", your brain will automatically fill in the blank based on past experience.

Years of experience, that's all we can do. So put your head down and keep experiencing.

[roddy]

Does that first course you mentioned come with CDs, or is it only with cassettes?

I think this was already asked in the linked thread, but it's tapes only unfortunately. As for availability, it's still in shops in Beijing. Are there any shops in Shanghai that specialize in CSL materials?

[L-F-J]

listening to the snipet and reading your line at the same time i can see how you would come up with whatever "kan dei youhei" is if you didnt know the word kending.

so it wasnt your listening skill. it was simply a matter of vocabulary- which is so important. if you had the vocabulary i'm sure you would have caught it.

[anonymoose]

Are there any shops in Shanghai that specialize in CSL materials?

I only know of one, a fairly large one on Fuzhou Lu (just down the road from the big Shu Cheng), but they didn't have that series last time I checked there. I'll have another look next time I'm in the area. In any case, if the books only come with cassettes, they're not of much use to me.

[roddy]

It's not too much of a hassle to convert them to mp3 format - a cheap tape player + 3.5mm to 3.5 mm cable will let you record it onto your computer, and you can then either leave it as one big audio file or cut it up into sections. Quality isn't great, but most of the CSL CD's I've heard seem to have been produced in the same way anyway (although they somehow manage to only fit 20 minutes of audio onto a CD. Can't think why.)