The best use of audio to improve listening comprehension?

[ihoop]

Hey all,

 

I have recently come to the conclusion that I want to seriously improve my listening comprehension.  I have been studying Chinese for close to two years now, and the thing that discourages me the most is listening to the news in Chinese.  Even after two years of pretty regular study I find that sometimes the news is almost incomprehensible to me and it is discouraging.

 

Of course, I realize that this is just another plateau in my Chinese learning and that I have already come a long way.  I think it is important to remind yourself of these things too.  I have friends that only speak Chinese, my girlfriend and I never speak English and have conversations about all sorts of things, talking with locals is never a problem, etc. At this point, I can say that I do "speak"  Chinese, but I want to have the same facility in Chinese that I do in my native language.  I want to be able to turn on the TV or radio and somewhat flawlessly understand what is going on.

 

Anyway, I am thinking that there are two ways I can go about this.  The first would be taking small segments of the news and breaking them up into sentences and putting these sentences into anki.  After doing this, I would listen to these sentences over and over until I understood them.

 

The second method would be more of a sort of "extensive" listening practice.  I would download and listen to a bunch of news every day.  If I heard something I did not understand I would look it up in the dictionary, but after that I would just keep listening.  I would not make a conscience effort to review every little thing that I did not understand (by putting sentences into anki) but would hope that over time natural vocabulary acquisition would take place. 

 

What do you guys think?  And, what has worked for you in the past?  To be honest, I feel like I have been a sort of slave to Anki the past two years, and getting it out of my life for a little bit would be very refreshing.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

-Ihoop

[imron]

In my opinion, the best way is take some audio that you want to be able to listen to (e.g. the news) and break it down piece by piece until you can understand it, and the practice making those pieces longer and longer.  I've outlined the method I used here, and found it to be incredibly helpful.  The most important thing is to do it every day for a sustained period of time - 1 month should be enough to start to see initial progress and after 3+ months you should notice significant improvement.

 

I would avoid putting the sentences and recordings themselves in Anki.  Just add the new vocab, and spend the rest of your time listening to the content.  Also, if you are getting enough regular exposure to native content, don't be afraid to free yourself from flashcard slavery (see discussions here, here and here).

[bande]

Reading a newspaper in the morning can also be very helpful. There is usually a lot of overlap in the vocabulary from the morning to evening. I always enjoyed being able to read the Beijing News in the morning and the hear similar stories discussed at night.

[hedwards]

The best way is going to depend a bit on your level. If you're not hearing everything, then there's really no way around dictations. Even if you are hearing everything, dictations will keep you honest about how much you're really hearing. The ideal thing is to work from word for word transcriptions of an MP3. You then just write what you hear and when it doesn't match what you've written you listen even harder for it the next time.

 

You're probably going to hate doing it, I know I do, but I've never come across a method that was as good at boosting comprehension.

 

Now, if you're doing a good enough job of that, the recommendations about vocabulary come into play. But, if it's more or less incomprehensible to you, then I don't think that you're ready for the suggestsions that you've been given. A really good source of material would be something like Glossika where they've gone to a huge amount of trouble to make sure that you're only needing to listen to one or two sentences at a time early on and you're provided with the meaning, pinyin, characters and I think they include IPA if that isn't enough.

 

For listening, it's a particularly good deal as you really want to be working from clean, properly transcribed materials at this point. I'd expect to see meaningful growth within the first couple weeks depending upon how hard you're working at it.

[simc]

This topic has come up before. The advice in that thread is very good if you haven't seen it already.