Need Advice for Developing my Speaking & Listening Skills

[jasons89]

So I've been studying Mandarin for about 4 years, but this is the first semester in college that I'm not taking a class simply because no matter how many words I learned, my speaking and listening skills were still awful and that not only hampers my ability to communicate but also my ability to absorb new words and (probably) read them as well. I'd always considered my grammar fairly decent, but since I stopped doing Chinese for a while I need to get re-acquainted with it.

This past month I've been working from the beginning from the FSI language tapes, but I'm encountering problems with them. Aside from how the grammar taught in the tapes seems to be a bit different from what I remember, I still feel like I'd have trouble accurately producing a word or sentence properly given it's pinyin spelling, and given a spoken word or sentence I don't have faith in my ability to determine the pinyin.

So what should I do to develop my speaking and listening skills from here, and is it absolutely imperative that I use a phonetic system like pinyin, or would I be better off just throwing out any mental references to tones entirely and just trying to pronounce words the way I hear them?

Sorry for the page of background, and thanks in advance.

[Xiao Kui]

is it absolutely imperative that I use a phonetic system like pinyin, or would I be better off just throwing out any mental references to tones entirely and just trying to pronounce words the way I hear them?

it seems like you need to spend some time nailing down what sounds the pinyin stand for because once you learn the system they do represent the sounds of the language pretty well. I think pinyin's an excellent tool for learning. Once you have it down you can pronounce anything in Chinese. When I installed Pleco I didn't even bother to load the pronunciations because the pinyin is all I need for that. i only ever listened to the first lesson of an FSI course for Cantonese and it bored me to tears. Perhaps the mandarin version is better, but I would suggest something like ChinesePod or PopupChinese.

Their podcasts are pretty interesting and would definitely improve your listening and probably affect your speaking as well.

[skylee]

Don't get disheartened. Even if you are not good at speaking and listening, perhaps you can read and write if you keep on studying?

And perhaps you can try to watch some TV dramas (that are interesting) and just mimic what is said? Take a look at this thread -> http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/24097-tv-series-recommendations-and-index-thread/

[renzhe]

Speaking and listening must be practiced, and they need more practice than most people realise when they first start learning.

Depending on your level, lots of listening (like TV dramas skylee recommended) and lots of conversation practice with a tandem partner can be really helpful. By "lots", I mean hundreds of hours, like finishing 4-5 full TV series and meeting a language partner for two hours every week for a year, as some sort of minimum. Keep up the reading practice in the meantime, it is useful for vocabulary and reading subtitles.

These things take time and continued effort. It is frustrating, we all know the feeling. Assuming that your study programme is solid (regular study, lots of reading, decent vocabulary), attacking speaking and listening with brutal amounts of volume usually helps a lot.

[blackmeow]

to renzen:

we must face the fact that his current skill are not ready to watch TV shows, the news maybe, but not the shows or dramas. i understand that this is the best way, but just not yet.

to jasons:

right now the first thing u need to do is to learn pinyin, and more importantly-- do nothing else but pinyin. learn pinyin first, then start to watch the TV news with chinese sub-titles. for about two to four hours a day, u will find urself in a better position of speaking and listening in about two one month time.

[imron]

we must face the fact that his current skill are not ready to watch TV shows, the news maybe,

TV dramas are far easier to understand than the news.

[blackmeow]

ehhhh......maybe u are right.

TV　dramas often contains slangwords and diffcult accent, but by using easy words, it could be the easier one. I am not so sure about which one is easier for fresh student. I guess he just have to try and find out which one: dramas or the news are more fit his needs.

[renzhe]

I'd also like to point out that it will be extremely difficult to have decent conversations in Chinese if you can't follow simple dramas*. Because people in these dramas basically speak to each other, like they will be speaking to you.

I do agree that it's important to nail down the pronunciation of pinyin as the very first thing. But I've also made the experience that it's often extremely difficult to figure out what was said exactly because things like q/j/x can sometimes sound very close in fast speech, as do some of the finals. You can use context to disambiguate (whole words and phrases), but you need good listening skills for that. It is possible that he can hear and pronounce sounds OK in isolation, but is overwhelmed when a long sentence is spoken very fast. So I think that developing listening skills can be very useful.

* keep in mind that some dramas are very easy, while others are exceedingly difficult. Of course you should start with easy ones. And don't need to understand 100%, just follow what's going on and get most of it.

[imron]

TV　dramas often contains slangwords and diffcult accent, but by using easy words, it could be the easier one

What makes news more difficult is that often it is just the newsreader reading stories and often reading at quite a fast pace. This can make it very difficult to follow, as you need to be able to understand most things in order to be able to follow it effectively.

With a drama, even if you don't catch every word, you have a lot more visual context that helps you fill in the gaps, and often you can still follow what's going on even if you don't always understand the dialogue.

[blackmeow]

to renzen:

you are right, i should know that there are dramas much easier then others, and for your q/j/x part, it is true that if the student learn chinese after the age of 15 years old, these will become very hard indeed. i can understand ur point, and sure the drama which they use simple oral chinese, do help a lot for students which have this difficulty.

to imron:

yes, i agree with u. apart from the perfect accent the news are hard to catch, because the news programs are limited by its length of just 30 mins to finish massive information. so to understand the news really need to understand most of the words. i see the reason it is harder then dramas.

to both of u:

as i am a chinese, and i am not a language teacher, i may used a lot of ideas from my experience of English learning. and thank for remind me that as well as the language themselves are different, the learning method is also different. i will keep it in mind if i give other suggestions for this kind of topics. thx!

[jasons89]

I'd say my main trouble is with people speaking fast, and correctly identifying tones in combination quickly. The most difficult tone to identify for me is the second tone when compared with the first, especially in words like 台湾 and 台南. I'd say I have a pretty decent understanding of the pinyin system, and I understand even the more tricky consonants (j,q,x,zh,ch,sh), but I find that sometimes the tones in a sentence don't always seem to match each other, as if the same syllable with the same tone is pronounced differently in different situations (and I know the rules of tone sandhi as well, but that's not what I'm talking about). Because the sounds don't always match each other, I feel like I rarely pronounce a word correctly on the first try when I only have pinyin as a guide. Perhaps it's just the tapes I'm listening to, or my ears are playing tricks on me.

[anonymoose]

Personally I find the news easier to understand than dramas.

[edelweis]

Regarding the language exchange+watching dramas combo:

since I started informal language exchange (we just talk about basic biography, studies, work and hobbies in both languages), the dialogues in 家有儿女 seem to have become sentences I could say, or someone could say to me, instead of just "something the actors say".

My level hasn't improved overnight - I still couldn't understand most sentences on the 1st try or produce similar sentences myself (unless very basic). It's just that I am more implicated in the show now, somehow more motivated to listen and reuse.

Also I feel more confident that I can have a basic conversation in Chinese even if it's only with a very patient partner => more motivated.

So IMHO it's really useful for people who are not in China to find someone to talk with in Chinese once a week or even less.

Regarding pinyin: FSI does not have characters, so if you want to use it then you need to either review pinyin seriously or always use the tapes and not the PDF.

(but being a visual learner, I find pinyin unavoidable - even when listening to tapes I tend to visualize the pinyin... I hope someday I'll visualize the characters directly).