Some advice on listening and speaking?

[G - Steven]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if y'all could give me some advice. The name's Steven, I live in the Netherlands, I'm 17 years old 'n I've been studying Mandarin for some three years now. Since september 2006 I go to the local Chinese school, which teaches the Huaqiao to learn Mandarin from scratch; the material is mainly focused on learning characters.

The thing is, my reading level is pretty high, so the Chinese lesssons from the school's texbooks are to easy. With support from the Chinese School I've taken the HSK Elementary-Intermediate level test. I haven't got the results yet, but from the exercise tests I did at the Chinese school for preparation I learnt that a score of 4 or 5 is most probable.

However, my speaking/listening proficiency lags behind pretty far on my character comprehension. One could say that Im better at Chinese (that is, characters) than Mandarin - the spoken part. I could read and understand news articles from, say BBC Chinese or Xinhua, but hearing the text spoken, I probably wouldn't follow.

As for that matter, the last real effort to improve my listening/speaking was Pimsleur. I had finished all 90 lessons before I went to Chinese School. Since then, I haven't made any major effort to improve the spoken part, mainly because I don't have too many options to do so.

I'm planning to go to Beijing in the summer of 2008 for 2 months. Back in the Netherlands, I'll begin my first year of Internation Law at the university; so I'm not how much time remains to spend on Mandarin.

So my question is, what do you think should be the best path to follow until then?

My plan so far has been to completely ignore the listening/speaking part, which probably explains the huge gap in proficiency. The way I see it, characters and words can be learned outside of China just as well, so when I arrive in Beijing with a substantial vocab, I can devote all my time to listening/speaking, which is a lot more difficult to develop outside of a Chinese speaking environment.

Right now, I'm expanding my vocab my printing out news articles and write down the words I don't know.

I'd like to know your views on this strategy. Do you agree I should focus on the written side of Chinese, or would any of you have suggestion on how to improve listening/speaking outsife of China?

[ChineseSpeaker]

For listening, I suggest you to take following 2 steps:

1. listen to the Chinese radio to TV everyday, you will first feel difficult then feel easy to catch the host.

2. The tone and gramar of what the host's speech is standard. When you feel comfortable with listening to the radio and TV, you can go to Chinese community to talk with native Chinese whose voice maybe not so standard and contains lots of shortened sentence and slang.

3. By communicating with native Chinese, your listening and speaking ability improves quickly.

For expanding your vocabulary, you may use a free tool I suggest in my signature. It needs free license.

[kudra]

cri has (mandarin radio) also has transcripts. search the forums for cri sucker, or crisucker, and username imron, ok here it is.

Also there is a listening course that roddy recommended, but it is on tape. I bought it and it is pretty good, haven't worked through it all, but the essays, skits, whatever you call them are kind of interesting. here is the thread, start at post 8, and read to the end for links, and updated links.

[imron]

I've also just updated crisucker with a new script (crilatest) that compiles the latest N broadcasts into an html file with an embedded media player to play the broadcast.

[helenlee]

how about find a chinese and fix a time to talk with him /her on MSN or Yahoo Messenger or some other web tools.

i think it is better to communicate with chinese native