dying in a sea of homonyms + accents

[victor557]

hey, i'm having great difficulties with my listening skills. specifically because of the enormous number of homonyms, and because i'm in the south of china where people cannot pronounce the zh, ch, and sh sounds. so shi becomes si and so on, which makes even more homonyms! e.g. someone was talking about cunjie, and it took me a while to figure out they mean chunjie (spring festival).

i've been studying for almost a year, and i can understand people who use standard pronunciation and speak at a moderate pace. but i often can't understand ANYTHING when people speak quickly with a strong accent (which is the majority of people here). this is really getting me down. i ask people for advice and they just say "speak to people!". well, i try that and the coversation hits a brick wall within 30s because i can't understand a word they are saying!

any advice on how i can deal with my listening problem?

[pancake]

Do you live somewhere where the local 方言differs significantly from standard mandarin? If it's just the zh/ch/sh thing it shouldn't take you too much time to get used to. Just keep plugging at it and you should be fine. Concrete advice? Start watching Taiwanese soaps. If there's some 难加上难 thing going on (like screwed up tones) then I can't help you, as I have difficulty with that kind of speech too.

[Guest realmayo]

The following might be extremely bad advice. But: I would consider occasionally experimenting with speaking in the same way, ie c/z/s for ch/zh/sh. It's fun!

Only do this for words where you are rock-solid sure of what the standard pronunciation should be: eg you know that you have no problems actually making the right sounds (eg "c" vs "ch"), and you know that the first part of "chunjie" is "chun" not "cun".

My experience was that, as a foreigner learning Chinese, where most of my new vocab came from books or me looking them up in a dictionary, I would always be learning a new word with its pinyin very close at hand. So even if everyone around me said "cun" not "chun", and even if I was in southern mode and pronouncing it "cun" not "chun", I would know that its pinyin is "chun" and that standard Chinese requires it to be spoken with the "ch", because that's how I had learned it.

Perhaps if I was a native speaker of a language like Spanish where the spoken corresponds very accurately to the written, this would be more difficult? But in English it's perfectly normal to see some words pronounced differently to how the spelling of other words would suggest they should be.

Maybe there's a risk attached to this, that you'll get confused or develop bad pronunciation. All I can say is that for me I can slip in and out of sh/ch/zh mode without really thinking about it and, when I do speak in sh/ch/zh mode I never seem to mix up which words should be prounounced which way.

And that, while I made an initial effort to speak in this different way now and again, I don't remember it ever being difficult, it never felt like an effort.

[rezaf]

i'm in the south of china where people cannot pronounce the zh, ch, and sh sounds.

Then go to north of China.

But seriously patience is the key. I don't think it's a good idea to expose yourself too much to heavy accents or dialects before you have a solid base in standard Mandarin. The main reason that Chinese people can normally understand heavy accents is not because they are familiar with those accents but is because they are familiar with the vocabulary and common patterns of the phrases and sentences used in Chinese. So just be patient, study harder and make friends with people who can speak standard Mandarin. After your Chinese level improves to a decent level(maybe after a year or two) you’ll be able to understand a wide range of accents.

[Guest realmayo]

Away from the north/south thing and just talking abour regular skills: search the forums for specific advice on improving your listening ability. This will obviously involve lots of time listening and relistening to material that is at your level. I'm a big fan of listening comprehension books even though I also hate them: I always do really badly at the exercises to begin with, even when they've been right at my level, and I get frustrated because it feels too much like a "classroom" or "test" exercise rather than real life and real language use. But when I've persevered -- done one or two listening comprehension tests every day for a week or two -- I've been astonished at how easier they become. And the easier they become the happier I am to do them, and the more I do them the better, I assume, my listening gets.

Also if you've got a textbook with dialogues or texts that have accompanying tapes/cds for those, listen to those a lot, sometimes with, sometimes without, the text in front of you.

But yes, I can remember feeling very discouraged that words I had learned and that I could recognise in isolation just never seemed to make it through my ears and into my brain when someone used them in conversation. It gets easier.

[victor557]

Thank you for the suggestions everybody.

pancake - i live where the main dialect is Cantonese. I suppose it's a lot different to Mandarin. i will try and force myself to watch some TW soaps!

realmayo - i've been trying listening exercises where they use the wrong pronunciation, it has actually helped a bit. but i haven't dared to actually try to wrong pronunciation myself. might be a little dangerous. and yes i've been listening to a lot of dialogs, which is how i really got started.

rezaf - i think you hit the nail on the head when you said it comes down to being very familiar with the vocab and common patters/phrases. which means it's definitely a long road ahead. i will keep trying.

[WestTexas]

I've been living in the same town in rural China for 1.5 years and the local accent still stumps me much of the time, even though the vocabulary and phonology here is mostly the same as standard. Tonight at dinner one of the other restaurant patrons was asking me about "sèngr jié". Took me awhile to figure out he meant shèngdàn jié. He also seemed to pronounce 'r' like 'l', which was actually easier to figure out, as there's no "lén" that I know of in Chinese - he meant 人. Nastiest accent I've heard in a long time. Also, when the people here yell, their speech seems to turn into a long stream of 儿，呀，嘛，and 伽 all garbled together incoherently to where you can't even tell how many syllables they are saying. Everyone under 30 seems to be able to speak pretty standardly though. I'm getting better slowly - I can understand most of the taxi drivers now - but I don't think I'll ever be able to fully understand the local accent.