A true test of your listening ability...

[brickholz]

**note: my intended audience for this invite is high-level learners, not native speakers. If you're a native speaker you're certainly welcome to try it out, but my semi-scientific curiosities are about people working with their non-native language**

 

Hey folks.

 

My name's Matt. I've been studying Mandarin for a few years, purely as a hobby. My more pedestrian life has me studying communication disorders.

 

A big part of CommDis (as we call it) is speech science.

 

If any of you guys are game, I have a little speech science experiment I'd love to run past you.

 

Basically: I want you to try and listen to some heavily distorted Mandarin, and see if you can tell me what it says.

 

It's not easy! And I don't recommend it if you don't have pretty good listening skills already. But if you wanna test yourself, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

 

For those who dare: 

 

http://mattseidholz.com/blog/2014/01/23/welcome-to-my-little-experiment/

 

I'd be sincerely grateful for anyone who pays it a visit. Appreciate the time. Thank you!

[roddy]

This is weird stuff. I can't make head nor tail of the Chinese examples on your site. I found this page and listened to the SWS versions - nope, can't understand the 'English' ones either. But then if I listen to one of the English originals and then listen again to the SWS version - it sounds obvious. But obviously it isn't obvious, or I'd have got it first time. 

[Lu]

I completely agree with Roddy. For the English examples in that link, once I know what the phrase is I can as good as hear the words in the whistles, but when I don't know, it's just random whistles. After listening to the Chinese ones a few times, I convinced myself that no. 3 is

你知不知道

, but I think even that is probably wrong.

 

I predict that, given adequate listening skills, you should be able to make a reasonable guess at what you’re hearing.

Perhaps Roddy and I are exceptions, but if not, I suspect you might find another outcome. I hope that won't be a problem for you.

[daofeishi]

What did you do? Filter away all the even Fourier components of the recorded sound waves?

 

It was completely impossible for me to hear that the English one was "popsicle" until I read it, let alone trying to make sense of the Chinese ones. It sort of sounds like the last word of the first clip is 热情, but I wouldn't bet on it. 

[gato]

Isn't this like stripping away all initials and finals and leaving only the tones, so instead 2 or 3 possibilities for a word, you have 3000, 30,000 or maybe even more possibilities for a word, so obviously you won't able to recognize it unless you are first told what you are listening to.

Is there something more to this?

[Baron]

I third Roddy and Lu.

 

It's bloody hard to understand the English before you read it - neither the popsicle one nor any of the ones on the page Roddy linked to were remotely comprehensible.

 

Pretty much all you're left with is the rhythm, stress pattern, and if the ability to differentiate consonant types on a very basic level, and even with that the stops are the only ones that are clear. But even with that info you still need to peruse the who of your mental lexicon to find a match - very unlikely. What are the odds that you'd be able to work out a whole sentence out of all the possible sentences in the world? Perhaps if you've listened a lot to a bunch of them by the same speaker it would get easier.

 

Also, with the isolated word 'popsicle' I reckon if you told people it said 'smelly fool', 'tap the shoe' or 'timbuctoo' they would accept it. Incidentally, I can't hear the 'popsicle' because the rhythm and pitch (if it's pitch I'm hearing) are so far removed from how I'd pronounce it.

 

If I were doing the experiment I'd get a list of say say 100 countries and make record people saying them to make the mental lookup easier, or get a bunch of similar sounding words (minimal pairs or similar) and stick them in small groups to see if people could distinguish.

 

It's an interesting concept for an experiment. I'd like to know how my brain processes Chinese.

[Baron]

@gato

 

It's not exactly stripping them away. You can still detect in what type of consonant they are to a degree especially if they are fricatives (things like s, th, f, v, z). In the English ones it's easier to notice because the syllable final consonants are the clearest sounds, but as Chinese doesn't have any syllable-final consonants that fully obstruct air flow...

[gato]

I know. I was using an analogy. But the process does make a sound much more indeterminate, increasing by orders of magnitude the number of possible words for a sound. You are really just making a random guess when there are hundreds or thousands of possible word choices for a sound. Is the test result meaningful at that point?

[Hofmann]

In roddy's link to the English ones I could make out one fully and part of another. (Maybe I would have done better if it was American English.) On your page I couldn't even make out "popsicle." It seems you use a different way of processing the audio. All your files are heavily clipped. Turn down your preamps or use a limiter or whatever. However, I can at least guess on number 3:

放假，也要叫我

[Koxinga]

I have a couple of partial guesses. I wrote characters of words that I was at least somewhat sure about. I wrote pinyin if I heard the sounds but I couln't tell what they mean (my vocabulary is not that great). And I wouldn't consider myself an advanced learner nor (gasp) fluent.

1. ...要不要...xin

2. ...在我國家...you4 dao4 da1

3. 放假,也要找我 (I hear zhao here instead of jiao that Hofmann heard)

4. 你知不知道

5. 你...怎麼...hou4 da1

6. not a clue

7. ...一點... 誰?

I'm really curious about the results of this experiment. Whatever its purpose is.

[brickholz]

Hey guys wow I'm flattered by all the responses. Thanks.

A consistent message I'm hearing is that the audio is just miserable to listen to. Is that correct?

I very appreciate the time you guys took to listen to those recordings. I think my next step will be to reveal the answers to you, and see what you hear afterward.

If you're interested in the answers, and you want to participate, could I trouble you to use my site's contact form to email me? I especially could use your demographic info - age, sex, location, years of studying Chinese, etc. That will help me formalize the experiment a little bit.

So thanks again! Hope to hear from you all.

[Nathan Mao]

I couldn't understand anything. My Chinese is obviously not good enough.  Interestingly, neither is my English.

[imron]

I actually thought it was quite easy.  Here are my seven, I'm pretty sure I got them all right:

 

1.

Threepio, I've got an important message to deliver to Obiwan Kenobi, and with you or without you, I'm getting on that escape pod.

 

2.

But it's checkmate in two moves.  I don't want to let him win just because he's a wookie.

 

3.

I've found the main control to the power beam that's holding the ship here; I'll try to make the precise location appear on the monitor.

 

4.

I've found her, I've found her, she's being held in detention block AA-23.

 

5.

Power redirected to rear sheilds.......Ahhh, I've been hit

 

6.

His chances of survival are 725...to 1

 

7.

We can't go to lightspeed, the hyperdrive is deactivated.

 

[anonymoose]

I think Imron's answers are closest so far. Imron is definitely skilled at picking out the finer points of speech.

 

As for the English one that Roddy linked to, I could get three of them completely, and part of one of the others, which is interesting, because I thought I wasn't very good at listening to unclear speech. At least, I find it difficult to hear what people are saying in noisy environments.

[brickholz]

Well guys, obviously imron is right. The rest of you should be ashamed of yourselves.

 

It appears that I have some tweaking to do.  Everyone's telling me they can't understand the English, or the Chinese recordings. This  may or  may not have  something to do with the playback. I'll see what I can do to fix it.

 

Thanks for your repsonses and participation, guys. I'll see what I can adjust, and I might come back with some easier recordings.

 

Appreciated!

[Koxinga]

I think the playback worked just fine. It's just that this stuff is weird.

[Lu]

I agree with Koxinga. I could understand the English ones quite well -- once I had heard the original version. It's possible that it also becomes more understandable if it's said in context, or by someone you know well. But mostly, this stuff is weird.

[roddy]

What I've also found is that if I go back to listen to the English ones, having forgotten what they were meant to be, I again can't hear a thing. 

[歐博思]

I hear birds chirping on a fine spring day, not unlike the -25 C weather we've seen recently here.

 

For another great applied listening challenge, try listening for the calls of friends through earmuffs, a scarf, two hats and a car window: "Don't back into that 7 foot high snow drift!!!"  ...which you can't see through your frozen back window, nor really care since your Angry Whopper is falling in your lap.

 

Hear no evil see no evil !