Pinyin only for listening (intermediate & above)

[davoosh]

Hello,

 

Recently in one of my linguistic musings, I came up with an idea (it's probably not an original idea at all, but oh well) which I think might be interesting and I'd like to hear people's thoughts/opinions/experiences on it.

 

Basically, in short my theory is that if you focus on pinyin rather than characters for listening, it might help with progress. I am talking specifically about intermediate and upper levels here, as I assume beginners will still be using some pinyin anyway.

 

This might seem counterintuitive since characters are a pretty massive part of Chinese, especially at the upper levels. But, I'm sure a lot of us have experienced the familar 'reading easier than listening' - more so in Chinese than with European languages.

 

From my own experience, when I hear an unfamiliar word or don't quite catch a word, my brain often tries to 'associate' the correct character to help disambiguate homophones and the likes. Then I realised that in this case, going through characters is much like going through a middle man - native speakers' brains can process everything fine just from listening. For example, If a dialogue were written out entirely in pinyin, we should still be able to get the meaning without the need for characters, as people do not 'speak' in characters, we speak in sounds. 

 

My theory is that only using pinyin for a while when trying to improve listening (at higher levels) might actually be beneficial because you can map the sounds to meaning much more clearly as well as reinforce tone, etc.

 

An example might be, somebody uses the word 'shi2 shi4' which could be a number of things. If I see the characters 實事, I instantly know what is meant, however relying on sound alone I would not know apart from context, etc. Therefore pinyin more closely matches the 'reality' of spoken language in that you have to deal with the ambiguity which makes you think more and might speed up listening ability.

 

I might try this for myself for a while and see how it works out. I know that when I watch TV shows, I often read along with the subtitles and understand fine even though everything is a bit 'fuzzy' on the listening side of things because I'm relying on the characters visual shape rather than sounds. I find that I often misremember tones a lot too, even if I know the characters perfectly well.

 

Any comments are welcome!

 

 

 

[Shelley]

I have read your post several times and I don't understand, why do you need pinyin, something you read, when you are listening?

 

I am trying not to use pinyin so much for the very good reasons you mentioned in your post.

[davoosh]

Perhaps I should have been clearer - I meant more when reviewing new items of vocab or 'misheard' words, long complicated sentences, etc. Instead of writing down the characters (which you might already know) it might be more helpful to only rely on pinyin when consolodating any listening work done. I'm referring more to listening of native materials than textbook I suppose, where there is no transcription available (or maybe only available in characters).

 

Obviously the ideal is to be able to listen and understand without the need for any pinyin/characters at all, but sometimes it is helpful to write stuff down. It may just be that as I have learnt, I have associated the visual shape of a character with a meaning more strongly that with a sound (which is what I really should have done).

[Shelley]

I see you are in the UK, are you self studying? I am and have found my listening comprehension my worst skill because I have no one to listen to apart from textbook audio. I do watch CCTV sometimes but only CCTV news and documentary and they are aimed at English speakers but still has spoken Chinese and if you ignore the subtitles can be useful.

 

I just wonder if this situation you describe of understanding a characters for its shape rather than its sound is a consequence of learning without much listening. I have just started to use Pimsleur to try and correct this.

 

I still think though that you should still use characters because if you use pinyin you will not be strengthening that bond between character and sound, which you say you feel you lack.

[Lanchong]

I changed my pleco sentence flashcards to pinyin for a few weeks and, for me, it was harder work than it would be if I was reading hanzi. That's probably a good thing. I had to give more consideration to the context.

[stapler]

I think this is precisely what DeFrancis wanted to do in his textbooks. Everything is in pinyin. And I think he does so because he agrees with your theory. You should check it out.

[davoosh]

@Shelley, I am currently self-studying, but I have previously studied in China and regularly made listening an important (if not the most important part) of my studies. Although my level has probably decreased somewhat since not being in China, I still find listening to be one of the most frustrating parts. I'm able to usually get the gist of most things, and I'd say I'm familiar with the most common 3000 characters so I now often encounter new 'words' rather than characters.

 

This means that when I hear something I'm unsure of, especially low-ish frequency words, my brain immediately tries to visualise the characters when I should really be trying just to understand based on listening alone and associating the meanings more closely with the sound than the visual aspect of a character. Of course everything ties in and that's the goal, but as an extra boost to understanding, like Lanchong said, using only pinyin might help you think more about what a possible syllable could mean (when there are often numerous homophones).

[Shelley]

Ok I understand what you are getting at. I personally am trying to eliminate pinyin whereever possible, so this sort of goes against what I am trying to do, it also feels a bit, and this is only a flimsy comparison, like hearing English and visualising the phonetic symbols for English instead of just thinking of the word.

 

One more thing in the way of hear a sound, visualise a character, which is my goal.

 

However, if it works for you, why not, never knock something that helps.