writing down in pinyin

[Scoobyqueen]

I am wondering if transcribing (relatively advanced) Chinese audios into pinyin

[katyjo]

I've jotted lyrics in pinyin to learn songs.

[Senzhi]

Jotting down in Pinyin definitely helps for me, particularly the tones ... but only if I get the correct feedback! Else I'd simply continue jotting down the same mistakes over and over again.

I don't see the benefit of Hanzi in this approach.

[roddy]

I'm not sure if it's necessary to transcribe, but certainly listening, paying attention to the tones, and jotting down the words that are new or that you 'know' but don't know the tone (and for those you might want to look at how you learned them in the first place, as if you're failing to know the tone from the start then something is going wrong.

I find half the value of exercises like this is the subsequent increase of what I think of as 'tonal awareness' - it means that for the rest of the day I'm paying more attention to tones in what I hear and speak. Sometimes (ok, almost never) I might go through a short newspaper article jotting tone marks above characters, etc.

Transcribing in pinyin or characters probably depends on what you are trying to learn. You could always do characters with tone marks on top.

[Scoobyqueen]

I don't see the benefit of Hanzi in this approach.

This approach works well for learning to write hanzi, ie you listen to a text sentence by sentence and then write down the sentence in characters. It helps you remember how to write a wide range of characters, including those that are less used for example for names. Which method do you use for learning to write hanzi?

[Senzhi]

I usually practice writing Hanzi from written texts in Pinyin. I understand your approach, but personally, I would find it quite stressful. If I'd have to write that fast in Hanzi, it would even look worse than my English handwriting.

[Scoobyqueen]

I would find it quite stressful

Initially it is stressful

[wushijiao]

For years, I’ve thought that it’s most useful to basically try to get listening material that is at your current, but a bit harder (Level +1, or L+2).

But, recently (in the last week or so), I’ve listened to a lot of Steve Kaufman’s podcasts about language learning. I think his ideas and mine (not that I’d put myself in the same category as him in neither expertise or experience) are pretty similar:

- Do tons and tons of audio work

- Do lots of extensive reading (about things that you are interested in)

- Learn vocab in its natural contexts

- Don’t worry too much about grammar

(Anyway, I’d highly encourage people to read or listen to his various ideas. In essence, his formula for success really isn’t all that complicated. The determining factors are determination, motivation, being interested in the language and the material, getting rid of psychological barriers).

One of Kaufman’s important ideas, I think, is that after getting a fundamental base in a language (via some self-help textbooks with CD’s, or what have you), it’s good to work with real, native speaker audio, and to feel comfortable in listening with uncertainty, and listening to the same audio text over and over, to the point that one starts to understand it. To that extent, this technique is perhaps not unlike transcription.

However, in the past (say, five years ago), I tried to listen to a lot of Chinese radio online. While I can’t say that it was a total waste of time, I don’t think I got too much out of it at the time. Eventually, I had my wife (a native Mandarin speaker) help adapt lots of learning materials (mainly Chinese textbooks about news) into tapes, along with all sorts of other learning materials. While this really started to help my listening, I found that I’ve made by far and away the most progress in terms of recalling tones from memory and sentence tones from memory (and overall, just improving my listening in many different ways) by listening to materials made by native speakers for native speakers- mainly various podcasts. Although this was a solid two years after my obsession with graded materials and tapes, and I was more or less able to understand real materials by that point.

So, there seems to be the paradox in that graded materials provide the most effective uses of time, but materials made by native speakers are more useful in terms of really hearing how native speakers speak and getting to the most advanced stages of listening comprehension, which, I believe, will translate into better, more authentic speaking as well (something Kaufman also believes in). I think (and hope) that by doing a mix of graded and real, one can pole vault to the advanced stages as quickly as possible (while recognizing that listening comprehension depends a lot on hours spent listening, kind of like paving roads of wavelength understanding in the brain, and there's no real short cut to that).

So, for the intermediate learner, I think probably a mix of graded audio material combined with authentic speech in small doses might be one answer. (Lately, I’ve been listening almost solely to graded audio material in Cantonese, and I’ve certainly reached a plateau. Part of that might be because, compared to Mandarin, there's not much out there as far as learning materials past the intermediate stage...but in any case, I need to start doing something new).

Since I’m basically an intermediate in Cantonese, and since I’m looking for a way to get to the next stage, I think I’ll go ahead and try this method as an experiment (making small clips of audio, say, 30 seconds to a minute, and trying to transcribe it, looking up the words I don’t know and seeing if I can get the tones right. Then, I’ll listen to the clip again and again.) I’ll let you know in a few weeks whether or not it has worked!

[calibre2001]

by listening to materials made by native speakers for native speakers- mainly various podcasts.

Can you share with us which podcasts you're using? Thanks

[wushijiao]

Can you share with us which podcasts you're using? Thanks

Sure. Podcasts that I have listened to (almost every episode) over past two years:

中国从谈 - This is a show done by the BBC in which they usually have: 1) an expert talk about one of the major issues facing China, 2) 中国人谈中国- Chinese people talking about China (similar to mini-essays written to the editor, by famous people or common listeners) 3) a re-cap of the British media reports on China. This is a 15 minute podcast. I'd give this show a five stars out of five.

中国一周 - Made by RFA, this show recaps a week of news in China. However, almost all the news is about human rights abuses and scandals. Still, I'm inclined to agree with most of what they say, so I like the show. 15 minutes. four and a half stars out of five. (although if you don't like politics, or if you like the CCP, you'd give this 0/5.).

Shows I've listened to with decent frequency:

亚太报道- Made by RFA, this show re-caps the daily news, usually about human rights abuses and scandal, but with some international relations reports. It's worth noting that the RFA website has the transcripts of every individual story, along with MP3's that you can download for each story. So, if you happen to be at a mid-level of Chinese, you can always go to their website, find an article that you are interested in, download the MP3, and print out the transcript. 3/5 stars (with the caveat that it can be a great learning tool if you use it right, and that they often break some of the best stories about China, if you are in to progressive politics). Also, I can honesty say that listening to the way one of the hosts of the show- Ru Nan- speaks Chinese helped my ability to hear tones immensely.

德国之声- Made by Deutschwelle, this is a general news show, with lots of news about Germany, Europe, and China. Overall, pretty interesting. I listened to this every day for six months, and it helped me a jump to a higher level, I think.

Chinesepod- I listened to a ton of these when they were still free, and I always liked the intermediate and advanced ones, even if they aren't as challenging as stuff made purely for native speakers. Still, if I were trying to learn Chinese as fast as possible, I'd probably invest in these podcasts.