The Dictation Method of Listening Practice

[chinesestudent25]

Hi guys,

Though I have been observing for a while, this is my very first post on the forum. I have been spending the past few days working on a method of improving my listening skills in Chinese, and I wanted to share it with you all.

A little bit of background: I have been studying Chinese for 7 years now but have slacked in the past 2 years or so, although I would still consider myself an "advanced" learner. I currently live in Hong Kong and primarily use English at work, but it would be a great value-add to my gweilo colleagues to understand calls in Mandarin.

I would really appreciate your feedback and thoughts. The method:

1. Find a recent 30-60 news clip in Chinese from YouTube (example: http://www.youtube.c...h?v=UsWtVGgvqV0). I like stuff from 凤凰视频 but you can choose your own. There is a lot of really good and recent stuff on YouTube
   
2. Rip this into an mp3 using a tool like http://www.listentoyoutube.com/ (example attached)
   
3. Open up a blank text document (I used Wenlin but any software is fine) and listen to the clip as many times as needed, starting and stopping, to write out the whole dictation. In this instance, since the Shanghai bird flu is a pretty common topic, I used other written articles on the net to help me with vocabulary (and context)
   
4. Check with a native speaker for accuracy
   
5. Add this mp3 to your smartphone / iPod / walkman / whatever and listen 20-50 times for memorization
   

To avoid step 4, you can also find clips that include transcripts as well.

What do you think?

P.S. For reference, if anyone wants to try this example, the (corrected) dictation for the example clip is:

根据上海卫生和计划委员会通报，上海市4号新确诊了一例人感染H7N9禽流感死亡病例。那么患者是48岁的男性储某，江苏如皋人，从事鸡鸭运输工作，截至到目前8名密切接触者都没有临床异常表现。此外，浙江省同一天 新确诊了一例人感染H7N9禽流感 病历。患者张某，男，64岁，湖州市吴兴区人，是位农民。那么患者的密切接触者共有55人，至今都没有发现临床异常表现。而至今全国已经有11人确诊感染禽流感，分别来自上海市、安徽、江苏和浙江省，其中有4人死吧。

[OneEye]

I did this sort of thing for a while with clips from movies and TV shows. I also did some chorusing with some of the dialogue. I felt like it really helped my listening comprehension. Maybe I should get back to it.

[Scoobyqueen]

I think the third step should be handwriting.

[imron]

I think this sort of thing works really well. See also this post for similar suggestions, and see here for links to a popular TV talk show that has transcripts for each episode.

I'm not sure what you are using to listen to the mp3s, but Audacity works really well for this purpose and makes it simple to highlight portions of the recording to listen to and loop.

[chinesestudent25]

Cool, thanks for the suggestions guys. It sounds like it would be helpful to do handwriting for these instead of just with the computer. I am taking the HSK5 on May 12 so I need to get comfortable with writing characters by hand again.

As for listening, I have just been using iTunes controlled by the F7-F9 keys (I have a MacBook Pro) which has been convenient. But it is hard to loop a very tightly selected section or slow down the recording.

I tried opening my file with Audacity and there was an error--does Audacity have any issue with a file with a Chinese name? I'll have to investigate this.

[c_redman]

I recommend Transcriber over Audacity, as it has more bells and whistles. Transana is a similar transcription program that can work with video (though I don't know off-hand if it can do raw FLV files from Youtube without conversion).

[imron]

I tried opening my file with Audacity and there was an error--does Audacity have any issue with a file with a Chinese name?

Works fine for me under Audacity 1.3.13 on OSX Lion. What sort of error are you getting?

[raydpratt]

I, too, believe that writing out a conversation would be deep, valuable practice. I plan to use the audio-visual recordings at http://www.laits.ute...orkelm/chinese/ which are recorded conversations in Mandarin by 57 chinese professional men and women over a wide range of topics. All the audio-video clips have the option of showing the clips without any transcription, which would give me the opportunity to test my ability to write my own transcription, and the clips also have the option to show transcriptions alongside the running clips in either traditional characters, simplified characters, pinyin, or English. Yes, it is free.

[Limes]

I find that iMandarin Pod is really useful for the same purpose. Every week day they upload a short audio clip of three news summaries read out first slowly, then at normal speed, by a native Chinese speaker. There are transcripts available to download, as well as short lists of new words they think you might be unfamiliar with. You have to register, but it's free! When I'm feeling studious I try and do a dictation from one of the news summaries every morning... sadly I don't feel studious very often. But when I do it, I really think it helps!

Here's a link: http://www.imandarinpod.com/hoola/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=41&Itemid=57

[chinesestudent25]

@raydpratt and @Limes, thank you those are awesome resources. I will check those out because I want to pull from a wide range of sources. Also there seem to be a few sketchy YouTube channels that spam the Chinese language news clips with stuff from Phoenix and NTD (New Tang Dynasty) TV

@imron, I re-converted the file in iTunes to an mp3 (using that internal function) and now it is working fine. I think there was just something messed up with the file from the YouTube converter I used

I'll keep you guys posted if this helps--I start work in a little less than a month and hope to start getting more comfortable listening to Chinese over the phone by then (and continue improving of course using these techniques)

One more thing to solicit thoughts on--how many times do you think I should listen to the recording? One of my friends likes to say you should listen to a recording 50 times to really memorize it and get it in your brain, but I wonder if this is excessive

[imron]

how many times do you think I should listen to the recording?

It depends on your goals. If you are focused more on listening, then as many times as it takes for you to be able to listen to it without any problems in understanding. If your goal is to be able to reproduce and use similar language constructs then as many times as it takes for you to memorise it. The latter is much more time consuming, but can be very good for your Chinese.

[JustinJJ]

Does anyone know how I can download Audacity (or a similar program) in China?

Computer broke down so tried to get it on my girlfriend's computer but seems the website may be blocked here.