Getting out of a listening rut

[imron]

Split off from AdamD's post here

Despite incredible effort this year, my listening has gone backwards. I have tried everything there is to try and taken every single piece of advice, and I've still gone backwards. I cannot communicate because I don't know what anyone is saying. It devastates me to say this, but I'm considering giving it away entirely and just keeping up the reading/writing. Apparently I've wasted nearly five years, and I'm not prepared to spend another five getting nowhere.

 

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I cannot communicate because I don't know what anyone is saying

But are they speaking clear 普通话?

 

 

 

my listening has gone backwards

If you have a 400 day listening chain I doubt very much that this is the case, and maybe it's more that you're in a bit of a rut and are beating yourself up about it.

 

Try going back and listening to something you thought was difficult a year ago.  I bet you'll find it's significantly easier now.

[pross]

@AdamD What are you listening to? And, aside from talking with people, how do practice your listening skills?

[AdamD]

@imron:

 

But are they speaking clear 普通话?

 

Yeah.

 

Try going back and listening to something you thought was difficult a year ago.  I bet you'll find it's significantly easier now.

 

I just got back from Taipei. Last year I understood enough speech to have at least basic conversations. Last week I understood almost no speech, even though my reading has exploded. By any measure this is a backwards step in my listening. It's not just last week, but that's when it hit me just how bad I've become. It should be easier but it's not.

 

maybe it's more that you're in a bit of a rut and are beating yourself up about it.

 

I'd like to think so, but the evidence doesn't indicate that at all.

 

@pross:

 

What are you listening to? And, aside from talking with people, how do practice your listening skills?

 

For more than a year now, every day, I've been playing HSK audio and listening to news and chat podcasts, usually slowed down to 70–80%, and watching TV shows like 非诚勿扰。 All up 15 minutes minimum every day, but usually more than that in practice. That's in addition to trying to have conversations with people, in person and through apps like 微信 and HelloTalk. This past three months I've also been studying Chinese formally at university, the oral part of which ended pretty poorly.

[imron]

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Last year I understood enough speech to have at least basic conversations

One possibility is that you are no longer trying to have basic conversations, but are finding it frustrating trying to move on to more complex topics.  I mean at some point, having a simple conversation with someone along the lines of 'I have 2 brothers and 1 sister, and my favourite Chinese food is beef noodles' or whatever would have felt like a major accomplishment.  Fast forward a whole year of hard work and that sort of conversation is bordering on frustrating and meaningless.

 

That doesn't mean your Chinese has stagnated, in fact, quite the opposite.  It means your Chinese has improved away from that level of conversation but unfortunately it hasn't yet reached the next point you're aiming for.  This sort of thing will happen all the time as your Chinese improves and you start to get good at things that used to be difficult and so look for more advanced things - that also initially seem difficult but that you can eventually get the hang of.

 

Quote

usually slowed down to 70–80%

This might be part of your problem.  I would consider not slowing them down.  Instead listen to them at full speed and repeat as necessary until you understand.

[AdamD]

One possibility is that you are no longer trying to have basic conversations, but are finding it frustrating trying to move on to more complex topics. [...] This sort of thing will happen all the time as your Chinese improves and you start to get good at things that used to be difficult and so look for more advanced things

 

That's a fair point, and now that you mention it I no longer have problems with recurrent phrases like “中文很标准”，“热的吗？”，“带走吗？”，”八十五块“。Having said that, some stuff that should be simple really isn't (a couple of long, slow exchanges with wonderfully patient people did not go well, and utterly destroyed my confidence).

 

I assume my improved speed and pronunciation—most of the time I know the tones—and my ability to read text invites people to talk like I'm proficient, as David Ma mentioned at the bottom of this post. Perhaps I should try forcing myself to slow down, flattening my tones and pretending I can't read, just to gauge whether people dumb down what they're saying.

 

This has helped. Thank you for taking the time to go through this, imron.

 

This might be part of your problem.  I would consider not slowing them down.  Instead listen to them at full speed and repeat as necessary until you understand.

 

I've been doing more and more of that, but it still feels like I'm spinning my wheels.

 

Right now it's too hard to think about next year's goals (if I even set any, given this year's heroic failures), but I'm considering paying someone to speak Chinese only with me for two hours every week. No English, no teaching, no reciprocity, no helpful translations, just Chinese. I don't know whether it will work but my options are dwindling.

[imron]

I've been doing more and more of that, but it still feels like I'm spinning my wheels.

Here's the thing.  If you want to get good at something you need to practice doing that thing - not something that is almost like the thing you want to do.  Yes, there are baby steps and training wheels that can help you to a certain degree, but at some point you need to take the training wheels off if you ever want to learn to ride properly.  If you want to improve, then you also need to be pushing the boundaries of your current comfort level until those boundaries become your new comfort level - and then you keep pushing at your new boundaries and so on.

 

Listening at full speed is going to seem difficult at first but it's necessary for improvement.  Just split sentences up in to smaller chunks, repeat them, pay attention to the parts that trip you up, make a mental note that the next time you hear it it's not going to trip you up and then repeat until it doesn't and then repeat for all the other parts that trip you up until you can listen at full speed (even if only a small segment at a time).

 

Each time you get tripped up by some point and then work at that point until you can understand it then your level has improved by one little bit.

 

Unfortunately you won't feel that because if you are always pushing the boundaries of what you know then it will feel like no matter what, you're always hitting things you don't understand, and this is much easier to notice than all the little bits you have been improving.

 

It's important to recognise that this is normal, and not really a problem unless you are not learning the things that cause you problems.  It's easy to feel all the bumps and stalls, but difficult to see your boundaries/comfort level expanding - which is why I recommend looking back over material you found difficult a year ago (or 6 months ago, or whatever) because then it's much easier to spot the improvement.

 

I remember when I first started learning Chinese and the final chapters of the textbook I had (and accompanying audio) seemed impossibly difficult.  Looking back at them a few years later they seemed impossibly easy.  It was nice to get that perspective.

[Flickserve]

It is conceivable that different skills will progress at different rates and at different times. So try not to get down about the listening.

I think Imron's right about speeding up the dialogue. And since you have progressed, so have your expectations which is why you think you haven't progressed.

I get snippets of hearing Mandarin in my daily life. Not much, some of it with bad accent. People say I have improved, it makes me feel good for a while. Then I realise I can only say two sentences at a time.

If you are at University doing Chinese , the expectation is naturally higher but most of us get through. Blocks and slow progress to learning happen all the time. Then, it's time to take a breather, do something else for a while, let your brain consolidate, and then come back. I haven't been paying much attention to lessons but just watching a bit more on the TV. Change things around a bit in terms of topics. Switch between difficult things and easy dialogues. I don't think you need to agonise over trying to know every single nuance in a sentence.

[imron]

Something else I forgot to comment on.

 

 

and my ability to read text invites people to talk like I'm proficient, as David Ma mentioned at the bottom of this post.  Perhaps I should try forcing myself to slow down, flattening my tones

I think David is correct and this is a thing that happens when people think your Chinese is better than it actually is, and while slowing yourself down is ok (watch how a politician speaks compared to say a news presenter and you can tell one is thinking carefully about what they are saying), but I think flattening your tones (or otherwise introducing flaws in your Chinese) is a bad idea (slowing down is not a flaw).

 

Why practice making your Chinese have flaws and risk them becoming habit?

 

What you can do, is try and improve the ways you express to people that you didn't catch their meaning.  Sinosplice has a good post on this topic.

[pross]

Concerning goals, I can't recommend enough the videos that accompany the Intermediate Chinese Grammar Course on https://edx.org/. The professor has recorded several hours of lectures explaining Chinese grammar. It is given completely in Mandarin, using very simple, but concise, language. Perhaps a coincidence, but mid-way I experience a big boost of my listening skills.

 

For native speed content, I eased myself into it, starting with the weather report as the format is somewhat predictable. (Melbourne 3CW, weekdays from 5:30 PM)

[AdamD]

imron, Flickserve and pross, you've given me a lot to go on and I really do appreciate it. Generally I feel more positive now. I'll slow down my speech but I won't introduce flaws; I'll stop listening to slow audio; I'll review old material to gauge my progress; I'll let my brain consolidate the past semester (and the 200-odd traditional characters I've just picked up); I'll have a look at that grammar course on EDX; and I'll identify relatively simple and repetitive content (weather reports) to pick up rhythms and predictable phrases in a range. That can form the basis of my goal(s) for next year.

 

(Edit: Removed content related to the original thread, now not relevant)

[Lu]

AdamD, no worries! I was in Beijing and briefly in Henan, and listened to (and spoke with) a number of experts on various subjects. A few had heavy accents, most spoke pretty standard Mandarin. All in al I didn't have much trouble understanding them. Is that what you meant?

[robprobyn]

I'm currently living and working in Beijing but don't use Chinese at work, so I'm having a few lessons but also practising and testing my listening Chinese as follows: 

 

 - Practise on www.thechairmansbao.com as much as I can. This site has a range of brief passages with audio and transcript, at different levels.  I spend a while on each passage, checking bits I don't understand against the transcript, until I can pretty much understand it all the way through. 

 

 - Progress feels pretty slow to non-existent.  But occasionally (once every month or so) I take a 'Level Test' on Chinesepod (Upper Intermediate is the level that happens to suit me best at the moment - there are higher and low options).  Sometimes I do get a lower audio score than previously.  But there is an overall (slight ...) upward gradient. 

 

Not claiming this is any sort of panacea, but just sharing in case of any interest / use to others. 

 

Rob 

[eion_padraig]

Learning Chinese has a lot of similarities to be a long distance runner who races. When I was in high school and university I ran both cross country and track. I was fairly good.  

 

When I would set a new PR (personal record) at a certain distance, I'd feel pretty good. Maybe I'd feel good about it for a day or maybe even a week, but before long I'd start to wonder why I hadn't run even faster. Within another day or two I'd get my mind set to running faster and continue with my training to achieve it. It was hard to be happy with what I had done for very long because I knew I could always do better. Only once in a while when I'd really think about how much I had improved over a long period of time did I realize how much improvement I had really made.

 

Studying Chinese feels exactly like that at times. And it's a good thing because if I did get overly satisfied with my progress I'd probably stop studying after I felt like I had "learned enough." But it is important to look back on how far you've come and not to get discouraged by how far you still have to go.

 

Good luck.

 

Eion

[eliaso]

I have been living and studying full time in China for a bit over two years now. I started from zero when I came here and while I of course have made a huge progress I still struggle with every possible aspect of the language. Despite being able to handle every aspect of my life without the need to ask help from people to translate for me, I still way too often have to say '不好意思，我听不懂，(add word)是什么意思'. Or perhaps people don't understand what I'm saying and then I have to repeat things more slowly or explain things in a way that is different way for people to be able to understand me. For me a big part of my problems is that I'm just not working hard enough, which is another story, but...

I lately felt pretty good about my current 口语 level mostly because of meeting a few Chinese friends I hadn't seen in over a year and this time we didn't use English at all, and still we were able to talk about 'real stuff' a few hours straight. My friends were mind-blown.

A couple of weeks ago I was having a dinner with a bi-lingual friend that I always talk in English with. We started talking in Chinese with some other customers in that restaurant. I had very hard time understanding what they were talking and it made me feel very bad - and their 普通话 had no problems. Later I complained to my friend that how is this possible - even after two years I still can suck so bad. He told me: 'you've reached a point where people don't talk to you like you were a retard anymore, instead they talk to you like you weren't a foreigner. You still just have to work more'. And I will.

[AdamD]

Stoked that this is split off and we can go into detail. Thanks, roddy.

 

@Lu:

 

AdamD, no worries! I was in Beijing and briefly in Henan, and listened to (and spoke with) a number of experts on various subjects. A few had heavy accents, most spoke pretty standard Mandarin. All in al I didn't have much trouble understanding them. Is that what you meant?

 

Yeah. That's really good in terms of living up to your expectations, and it's good that you're able to work with variation in accents. That's a killer.

 

@Rob:

 

Not claiming this is any sort of panacea, but just sharing in case of any interest / use to others.

 

It does help, in that you can feel quite alone when you're not making the progress that others around you are making.

 

I hadn't noticed The Chairman's Bao's audio provision so I'll definitely look into that.

 

@eion_padraig: Your running analogy is interesting, because my wife also runs and she has similar issues with goals and PBs. It helps us a lot to compare our respective progress—sometimes I need to remind her how far she's come, and sometimes she needs to do the same for my Chinese progress. imron mentioned the importance of looking back; I know I should do that more often.

 

@eliaso:

 

I still way too often have to say '不好意思，我听不懂，(add word)是什么意思'.

 

This is probably the aspect that grates most, especially when you have to ask so often that you even annoy yourself. It wears you down.

 

Later I complained to my friend that how is this possible - even after two years I still can suck so bad. He told me: 'you've reached a point where people don't talk to you like you were a retard anymore, instead they talk to you like you weren't a foreigner. You still just have to work more'. And I will.

 

I do think this happens to me as well, in that people see me read a menu or a sign, ask a question using (mostly) correct tones and faulty but intermediate grammar, and reply at a million miles an hour. Having pondered this, I realised I do exactly the same thing when competent English learners speak to me for the first time. I assume there's a proficiency threshold beyond which people don't even think about the learner's capability and just talk like they're talking to anyone.

 

I must say, it was weird watching The Feed on SBS2 last night (an Australian news show), with a full-length report about students from China paying other Chinese people to sit their exams, and being able to understand roughly 50% of what they were saying. I don't know whether the subtitles gave me a leg up, whether I was tired and caught off-guard, or whether they were just talking in super-basic terms.

[Flickserve]

I do think this happens to me as well, in that people see me read a menu or a sign, ask a question using (mostly) correct tones and faulty but intermediate grammar, and reply at a million miles an hour. Having pondered this, I realised I do exactly the same thing when competent English learners speak to me for the first time. I assume there's a proficiency threshold beyond which people don't even think about the learner's capability and just talk like they're talking to anyone.

I must say, it was weird watching The Feed on SBS2 last night (an Australian news show), with a full-length report about students from China paying other Chinese people to sit their exams, and being able to understand roughly 50% of what they were saying. I don't know whether the subtitles gave me a leg up, whether I was tired and caught off-guard, or whether they were just talking in super-basic terms.

this is exactly my experience with Cantonese.

People talk to me like I have full fluency. Although I can understand a basic conversation, when something deeper comes up, I get somewhat lost with the vocabulary. Then, this vocabulary comes up infrequently so I can't remember for future conversations.

If you imagine how many topics with specialised words exist, it seems like a mountain. One day you might be talking about cooking in a restaurant, but how often would that specific vocabulary turn up in daily conversation? Could be a few months later.

So you got 50% of the meaning of that program. That's good. Watch it again. Can you pick up more? Turn off the Chinese subtitles. Still got the same level of comprehension? Are there words you know but didn't recognise when hearing them? Just keep listening to the same unfamiliar words over and over again.

I remember a time when I had a badminton coach. He was an international player. Couldn't speak any English. I spoke conversational Cantonese but not the technical terms of badminton. First few lessons were a nightmare. I understood nothing in his Mandarin accented Cantonese. Luckily my wife, who is fluent in Chinese, acted as translator. Each lesson, I would take a notebook to write down the principles of the badminton lesson, the footwork pattern, how to distribute weight and balance in English. Then, I would also ask my wife to write down the Chinese words that came up, such as footwork, centre of gravity, overhead, striking point, skill, technique etc. All these words never came up in my workplace but because I was training and playing badminton frequently, discussing it with a non-English speaking training partner and then watching cantonese commentary on the subject, I became pretty fluent in that topic. Later, I took a coaching course to gain a coaching qualification in badminton, the practical part all examined in Cantonese. Even now, if I coach badminton, the Chinese comes out more fluently than my English! The offshot is that I can pretty much pick up most commentary on different sports.

However, you give me a topic like cooking or flower arranging or a discussion on politics, I am totally lost. It doesn't help that I don't actively learn Cantonese vocabulary. I might have heard those words before, but the exposure was too infrequent and passive.

I think you're doing the right thing in listening more. The point of all that is, do you have enough variation in input of the SAME topic? Once you get used to listening to the same material and vocabulary presented in different ways, you will have nailed the listening part. Instead of saying 我不懂，you will/should be saying, 不好意思，请你在说慢点儿。你的意思是。。。？（to which at this point the conversation will carry on at another million miles per hour. LOL). This is exactly what we do in English or technical terms in English that we are unfamiliar with. However, being able to listen is not the same as being able to use it totally (though it helps a lot).

This thread helps me a lot. I never really analysed how I managed to learn Cantonese and now it comes out. I always thought I was crap at languages and had difficulty with learning Mandarin (you can read my previous posts). It has been quite frustrating trying to improve listening skills because you personally cannot control somebody's voice. I think it's the sheer volume of input that becomes overwhelming and frustrating. Once you get used to 10% of the input, you work on the next 5%, then the next 5% and then suddenly you find yourself understanding 70% of what is going on.....

[AdamD]

@Flickserve:

 

People talk to me like I have full fluency. Although I can understand a basic conversation, when something deeper comes up, I get somewhat lost with the vocabulary. Then, this vocabulary comes up infrequently so I can't remember for future conversations.

 

This kills. I know what 空调 is, but when the guy in the Taiwanese hotel said “冷气” at me six times I had no idea what was going on. I presume there's been a lot more of that breadth of vocabulary coming at me recently.

 

I think you're doing the right thing in listening more. The point of all that is, do you have enough variation in input of the SAME topic?

 

That's a really good point. Probably not. My listening has been within a fairly small scope of material by largely the same speakers, so I'm not getting enough variety. An excellent tip which I shall act upon.

 

It has been quite frustrating trying to improve listening skills because you personally cannot control somebody's voice.

 

100 x this. You can control reading speed, and even pre-recorded audio to some extent, but that person in a shop has got a job to do. Last week I ended up with a glass of hot milk, because people were behind me in the queue and I was just saying yes to everything I didn't understand.

 

So you got 50% of the meaning of that program. That's good. Watch it again. Can you pick up more? Turn off the Chinese subtitles. Still got the same level of comprehension? Are there words you know but didn't recognise when hearing them? Just keep listening to the same unfamiliar words over and over again.

 

Another great tip. Thank you! I'll do exactly that (if it's available).

[imron]

This kills. I know what 空调 is, but when the guy in the Taiwanese hotel said “冷气” at me six times I had no idea what was going on.

Here's another thing that could be affecting your ability to have a conversation.  If you're learning mostly from mainland based materials and friends and then trying to communicate with Mandarin speakers in Taiwan there will simply be a lot of common vocab from one group of people that is not commonly used in the other group and vice-versa.

 

Similar to how English speakers from different countries will have different words for the same basic things e.g. Petrol/Gas, Rubbish Bin/Trashcan, footpath/sidewalk and so on.  Native speakers will be able to pick up and understand the differences without too much trouble, but unless you have a very broad, and cross-regional vocabulary you're going to need to learn a bunch of basic vocabulary all over again.

[AdamD]

That's true. I had assumed (probably arrogantly) that Taiwanese people would drop to a universal/common 普通话–国语 vocabulary for learners, in the same way I stick to clean, universal English when speaking to English learners, but of course they're not all going to know those differences.

 

Other differences I picked up off signs and menus (e.g. 芝士 v 起司), but if people had said them to me before I saw them (and probably did, now that I think of it) I'd have been totally lost.

[Lu]

Yeah. That's really good in terms of living up to your expectations, and it's good that you're able to work with variation in accents. That's a killer.

I've been at it since 2000 though, lived in China and Taiwan for some 6 years in total...

 

The trick for dealing with accents is that it helps to know a few common pronunciation changes: l/n, -n/-ng, retroflexes/no retroflexes. There are some more that I can't think of now. Then, once you hear someone going on and on and you can't make head or tail of it, you just start substituting sounds until it starts to make sense. And then you'll resolve 'sī, lóng, gōng, sāang' (with some context) to 士农工商 or 'bōdàn' to 不断 (to name a few examples that I wrote down because the guy's accent was interesting and strong). I suppose this kind of thing comes with listening to different accents a lot.

 

But by all means, work with clean Putonghua first! It's not my intention to discourage you.