Reflection on Reading Aloud

[abcdefg]

It's evening as I sit here with my textbook reading the new chapter aloud. This supposedly kills more than one bird with a single stone or maybe it still kills only that single bird but kills it in more ways than one way. Using the new vocabulary items, recognizing characters and words, absorbing proper sentence structures and grammar patterns as well as practicing speaking -- making the appropriate sounds. I seldom read silently in my infantile Chinese world.

I should be pleased that I can stagger through two pages of large font Chinese dialogue, but in fact it's difficult to be smug about my progress since my reading would sound to a local with an ear pressed to my front door like a deep-voiced six year old reading moderately easy stuff out loud and doing it painfully slow. So here I am about four years into this project sounding like a six year old at best, more likely a mildly retarded six year old.

Unfortunately, progress is measured in years instead of weeks in this challenging undertaking. Alas, I started way too late in life to ever attain proficiency. But I crawl on up the hill, oblivious to the rain and fog.

[renzhe]

How long have you been reading aloud? Four years? Or is that four years of study in general?

Reading outloud is really humbling :/ Do you have a native speaker to correct you? I find this very useful.

朗读 is one of those things I've been neglecting and should start doing. Together with 成语 and more conversation practice.... So little time

[amandagmu]

Oh man, this is the story of my life in one-on-one right now.... we get to the end of discussing a paragraph of text and she says "now read it back to me" and I must say I feel like an idiot. Reading silently feels so much better, when I can't hear/feel myself stumbling over words and stop to think (too long of a pause often) "did I get that tone sequence correct?" Ugh. But I suppose this is my punishment for spending a lot of time reading lately and not a lot of time practicing 口语... the struggle never ends....

[Glenn]

Yeah, one thing about reading silently that helps speed is not being hampered by the sound of my voice, which makes me focus more on pronunciation. Or maybe it's the mechanics of it. I'm not sure. I tend to move my mouth when I read silently, positioning my lips and tongue at least roughly where they'd be if I were actually saying it, but when I read aloud and notice that my voice when down when it should have gone up, or that my tongue wasn't quite in the right place when I was pronouncing "zhi" and it was slurred in a funny-sounding way, or that I added voice to the initial of a "bo" or something, my mind gets distracted, stops paying attention to the words, and immediately goes to pronunciation. Then I have to go very very slowly and try to get it right and then speed it up, whereas if I were reading silently, if I'm familiar enough with the vocabulary and phrasings, I feel like I can fly through the text (there isn't much text like this, by the way). I keep hoping that watching TV shows and movies and occasionally repeating what's accessible while looking at the subtitles will remedy this, and perhaps it will, just not as soon as I want it to.

[abcdefg]

How long have you been reading aloud? Four years? Or is that four years of study in general?

Reading outloud is really humbling :/ Do you have a native speaker to correct you? I find this very useful.

I've been studying Chinese about four years all in all. Was advised to read aloud early on and have been doing it consistently ever since. At present I take one-to-one classes (in Kunming) with an excellent native teacher so my errors do get corrected and I have someone to imitate. You're right; it is extremely useful.

Last year I hired a separate tutor, in addition to my main "comprehensive" one, and we spent most of our time reading simple books together. Found it helped my phrasing sound more natural. (Still a long way to go, however. 还差得远呢。)