How to improve listening comprehension of news?

[Koonder]

Hi all,

 

Currently, I'm able to follow modern drama for +90%, custom drama +50%, and news +30%.

How can I improve my listening comprehension of the news? I don't think listening to the news daily will be effective at all. But then again, I don't have any other learning method to speed up the learning process.

Should I analyze one news fragment at the time, or just listen to the news extensivly untill I get it?

 

Maybe there is a set of news vocabulary that can boost up my comprehension, but I'm not sure about this.

 

Any suggestions?

[hedwards]

Learning vocabulary is clearly going to help you develop listening comprehension, but it's not sufficient. Remember that news reports do have a register and a vocabulary, so taking the vocab from the subtitles or possibly just from news paper articles is likely to help you to learn the vocab you need.

 

Analyzing fragments will likely be more beneficial to you than just listening to a large amount. Listening to large amounts of news radio is mostly useful if you aren't yet comfortable with the intonation and stress patterns of Chinese. If you're already comfortable, I'd recommend only doing that periodically to keep an eye on your progress.

 

The ideal situation is really going to be getting short clips and transcribing them. Transcriptions are a real pain to do, but they force you to really listen to what's actually being said and then force you to recognize when you're not hearing correctly. Ideally you should only use clips where there's a word for word transcription available as it's good to have something to check against when you've finished.

 

When I'm teaching English, I have a set of recordings that I like that come with transcriptions and questions to answer. If you can find something like that for Chinese, it would probably be perfect. Eventually, you obviously want to get to the point where you can listen to the report and pick up words by context to learn.

[gato]

You could improve your news vocabulary by reading more news, in addition to the listening you are doing now. Just go to one of the popular news sites and try to read something everyday. Or download a newspaper app like 新京报.

[imron]

I don't think listening to the news daily will be effective at all.

Just listening probably won't be.  You need to actively study it for a period of time.  If you're already understanding large amounts of native content, a few months should probably be enough.

[JustinJJ]

Recently someone suggested this website, which has the news recorded with transcripts: http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/chinese/

 

You could listen to an article first, then listen while looking at the transcript and each time you see a word written that you don't understand make a note of it (easier to do on the go if you paste the article into word first)  and then after you finish listening the second time, go and look up the words you didn't understand. 

 

Now that you understand the words, listen again while reading the text, so the words you just looked up sink in a bit.

 

Then lastly listen again without looking at the transcript.

[abcdefg]

Here's what works for me at a simple level, living in China. I do it every day. It's not an academic approach.

 

I watch the Chinese-language TV broadcasts of local (not national) news. The low-budget format they follow is not the most modern. A host or anchor person reads the story, then they switch to a reporter live in the field.

 

I try to understand the gist of the story from what was said in the studio. Then I can immediately see if I got it right when they start transmitting pictures from the scene. I look up unfamiliar words on my phone as it goes along.

 

So if I think it said, "Building exploded in flames and ..." but they go to the scene of a car wreck instead, I know I wasn't listening well. If I think they said "Kunming's water reservoirs are less than half full" but the outside reporter starts pointing to something different, I realize I missed the point.

 

The beauty of this simple system is that you get presented with immediate feedback and are exposed the the most important words and phrases several times in the course of one "news story." It doesn't take much effort; I do it naturally and without breaking a sweat.

[roddy]

What news, specifically, are you watching? Chinese domestic or international? Politics, business, science and tech?

[abcdefg]

I watch the Chinese-language TV broadcasts of local (not national) news.

 

Yunnan daily news. the 6 p.m. roundup. Much of is is just the Kunming city news.

 

"Street repairs on 北京路 in front of 沃尔玛 disrupted traffic this afternoon at rush hour, causing a big snarl. Here now is 王洪, on the scene live." 

[sinosplice]

I recommend:

1. Listen to one short news story 2-3 times
2. Read the transcript with the help of a good dictionary (Pleco) and aim for 100% comprehension
3. DON'T try to memorize ALL words that appear in EVERY story; the key words will appear over and over
4. Listen to the same short news story again, 2-3 times, and aim for 100% comprehension

Over time, you will internalize the key vocab and sentence patterns that are common to most news stories.

 

The method I used:

1. Take on a translation job that forces you to translate news
2. Work your ass off because you want to do a good job

(I actually hated it, but it worked.)

[Koonder]

Another problem I‘m facing is that my reading comprehension is also far behind my listening comprehension.

At the moment, I'm diligently studying hsk 3 list and a textbook. It's quite time consuming and apparently I'm a slow learner.

Learning 20 - 30 words will take me a week when I study an hour every day. After reading many posts on this forum, I still don't know how some of you guys are able to study 10-20 characters a day successfully, even if it's for short period of time.

 

If I analyze a news item thoroughly, I will encounter lots of unknown vocabulary since it takes me a long time to memorize these words.

 

To sum it up, I have 3 options.

I can

1) add new vocabulary that I encounter when I'm analyzing news items.

2) wait till I'm at hsk 5 and then proceed with news items.

3) learn new vocabulary through listening, so I will not learn how to read or write the characters.

[gato]

Are you a heritage learner? Otherwise, I don't think you would be able to understand 90% of TV dramas with your reading level at less than HSK 3.

How are you spending your one hour per day? It seems that you should be able to learn more than 20-30 words with 7 hours of study per week.

[imron]

20-30 words a week is not a bad pace.  It's important to find a pace that you are comfortable with and can do consistently day after day, and then use time as a multiplier.  That said, what methods and tools are you using to learn new words?  Perhaps there might be more efficient ways to do what you are doing.

 

Regarding your three choices, don't do 2.  The sooner you start learning from news items, the sooner you'll learn all the vocab needed for doing this.  It will be slow going at the start, but will get easier if you stick with it (every day for a couple of months).

[hedwards]

I'm with imron here, both 1 and 3 are potentially good options depending upon the student. I'd recommend trying both and see which one seems to work better for you.

 

20-30 words a week can be too many, not enough or just right depending upon what precisely you mean by learning them. If you mean just recognizing them in context, that's probably not enough. If you mean to write that many, that might be too many.

 

I think that if you can find a news source that's aimed at people that are at your level, that's probably going to be the best. You'll need to actually read in order to learn to read, listening helps a little bit, but there's issues with that which have their own thread on subvocalization. And even without that, you'll still have to relearn the word as the phonetic component isn't typically strong enough to solve that problem completely.

[Koonder]

@gato 

I'm indeed a heritage learner. 

 

Previously, I studied new vocabulary with Anki only. I've switched my studied method to what people have recommended here on this forum. 

 

Regarding acquiring new vocabulary, I do the following:

 

I read the words on the HSK list first, paying attention to the radicals of the character.

For memorization, I'm trying to create a mnemonic with the use of radicals. I have a sheet of paper that has the most common radicals.

On the HSK list, there is no pinyin or definitions. Most of the time I add hints next to the words to remind myself what the words is either in my native tongue or English. 

 

After visualizing the characters and words in my head a few times, I can write the words from my memory, usually I write a word 2 or 3 times on average. But this recall ability isn't ingrained in my brain, I will soon forget how to write. I might, however, vaguely remember the words the next time I revisit these words. To enforce my recall ability, I repeat above stated process. Before I know it, an hour went by and I have only covered a few words. 

 

Offtopic:

How do you quote someone's post on this forum? There is only a quote button on the post message place.

[gato]

What about forgoing memorizing how to write characters and concentrating on recognition and reading? That should help you increase the number of words you learn.

[imron]

If you are a heritage learner who can already speak and understand a large amount of Mandarin, then I would ignore the word lists.  Just jump straight in to things like newspaper articles, short blog posts or other content that you might find interesting.  It doesn't need to be a full article, maybe just a paragraph or two to start out with depending on your ability.  Like gato mentioned, I would also ignore writing for now and just focus on being able to read and recognise words.

Once you've found an article, start reading it, and as you go, note down the first 10 unknown words (don't look them up yet, just write/note them down).  Don't do more than about 10 but feel free to keep reading the article, ignoring any other new words for now.  Don't worry about ignoring them, if they are useful they will reappear in later days anyway and you can look them up then.

Once you've finished, go through and look up those words, and add them to a program such as Anki.  Pleco will probably be even better because it's so easy to create and manage Chinese flashcards.

Then drill those words over until you can easily recognise them when you see them, and then go back and read the article again just for final reinforcement.

 

If you find 10 is too many and you're running out of time, scale back to 5.

 

At first it might be slow going as you may find that you reach that 10 word limit in the first few sentences - that's ok, just think of it as being like choosing random words from an HSK wordlist (after all, the HSK wordlist is based on native content anyway).  Gradually as you start to learn commonly used phrases and terms you'll be able to go further and further in to the article before your word limit is hit.  You'll also be implicitly learning words on the HSK list, but just not in the order they appear in the list, rather by the frequency with which you encounter them in native content.

 

Make sure you make time to do this everyday, and slowly but surely you'll find you are able to understand more and more.

 

Finally, I'll give a shameless plug for my Chinese Text Analyser software which can help automate most of the above workflow.

 

*Find an article you think might be interesting, copy and paste it in to Chinese Text Analyser and it will highlight all the words you don't know.

*Before you start reading, export a wordlist of the first 10 unknown words (or most frequent 10, or whatever you think is a good metric).

*You can export words, definitions, pronunciation, sentences containing the word (with optional cloze deletion) and more.

*Import those words in to Pleco/Anki and spend some time drilling them until you know them well.

*Go back and start reading the article, marking any known words as you go (or have the program automatically mark exported words as known).

 

The benefit this has over the method I mentioned first, is that you can pre-learn unknown words, which makes the reading process more enjoyable.  It will also largely automate the process of creating flashcards meaning you don't waste study time with flashcard maintenance.