Problems with Listening?

[maska]

Starting to learn a new language is hard. Everybody would have some sort of problems with a new language at some point, no matter it being listening, speaking, reading or writing. And when it comes to Chinese, listening and speaking seem to be the hardest part. When I decided I want to improve my Chinese listening abilities, I started to look for different tools or textbooks which could help. However, I did not find many good materials, so I started to think how to listen to Chinese. Yes, the question is not ''what'' to listen, but ''how'' to listen. I am going to share some of my personal experience with listening practice and some of the methods I have come up with while thinking about it or learning it

 

First things first. Let us ask ourselves a question: Do I really listen? You can not practice listening if you are not willing to take time, let us say an hour each day and practice. If the answer is ''yes'', then you can ask yourself another question: How do I listen? This question is a bit tricky, but if you think a bit, it is a very easy question. There are several ways or methods to solving each problem, and so it is with the listening. You can listen to a Chinese radio show while doing something else, or you can watch movies or use textbooks and listen to lesson recordings. Everybody has their own way. To be honest, the methods above are completely useless if you do not do your work consciously, thoughtfully and systematically. The point of practicing a language is not dividing it into four parts of listening, speaking, reading and writing and practice each part separately. These parts are actually just different approaches to getting to the same goal, which is learning the language. So, if you have problems with listening, you need to spend more time with listening, but at the same time you should not forget about speaking, reading or writing. Let us take an example practice with Chinese listening. I personally favour structured and systematized approach.

 

If you are a beginner, you should find a recording with a transcript. You should go through the transcript and find the words or phrases you do not understand. Write them out, find a way to understand them (translation into your language) and learn them. Do not use hanyu pinyin if you are using Latin transliteration, because Chinese is written in characters. Pinyin seems to be useful but if you really learn Chinese, get used to characters. After you have learned the words and phrases, write the tone marks above each character (without pinyin) and read the text out loud slowly as many times you can, so you can read the whole thing fluently. Then put the text (transcription) aside, and start to listen to the audio recording. Listen to it a few times, until you get crazy and then take a rest. After your rest put the text back on the table and listen to the audio file while reading it at the same time. Do that few times. If you can not do things slowly, there is no use to do them fast. Be conscious and aware.

 

If you are not a beginner and you have been learning Chinese for a while, so you have fair understanding of characters, you should not forget that you still are a beginner. Even those who speak Chinese fluently, still are not native speakers. Go online and find a recording you are interested in, it should not be too long, about five minutes or so. Then listen to it a few times. Take a piece of paper or a notebook, and write out the words and phrases you do not understand. Yes, in this case pinyin might be useful. Then use a dictionary and find the words and phrases, and learn them. Then listen to the recording again and again, until you think you want to study Japanese. Then you take a rest. Then you go on the battlefield again. You take out a piece of paper and write down the text you are listening to. You will have to listen to it many times probably, but this is called practice. After you have the whole text written out, put the tone marks above each character and read it while listening to it. Be conscious and aware.

 

Let us say that the recording you just listened to is a radio news that reported the environmental issues in China. You listened to it many times, wrote out and learned the words, characters and phrases you did not understand, and re-read the whole thing while listening to it at the same time. Now you want to be sure you really do understand more. Go online again, and find another report on environmental issues in China. There will be different words, different phrases, but surely there will be words and phrases you learned before and you will be able to understand more.

 

As you see, this approach is very structured and organized. It is not merely a listening practice, but it forces you to think and practice reading, writing and even speaking. I personally think listening to the news is one of the hardest but at the same time most rewarding way to study Chinese. After you have listened, learned and read a couple of news, your Chinese listening ability will show progress.

 

Practice makes perfect.

[wibr]

Off topic, but somehow your post breaks the chinese forums text wrapping and is therefore difficult to read..

[roddy]

And I'm on mobile so can't fix it. Moving off the front page.

[edelweis]

the OP has

everywhere instead of normal spaces. The results depend on each browser's interpretation.

Seems fixable by copy-paste to gedit (Linux) and copy-paste back to CF. The paragraph are still a bit long for my taste.

Edit: ah nevermind.

[maska]

Thank you for your reply. I saw you posted four news following the study method I described in my post, which probably means you also agree on the method being useful. I believe your audio files and transcripts will be very useful to those who want to practice listening! Thank you! 

[edelweis]

I used the GLOSS website for a while before deciding I prefer fresh rather than canned news. Anyway you can browse or search for older threads on the topic of listening practice. I believe there were posts by Imron and other people.

[edelweis]

btw you might want to provide a bullet point summary of your method. Your first post is a bit intimidating for people like myself whose first language is not English.

[maska]

Hey! Thank you for your reply. I have edited the text several times. Is it still difficult to read? I think the text is not to long so those interested in it can still read it. I am not a native speaker of English either.

[edelweis]

Maybe the post is fine as it is, I don't know.

I found one of the other posts (Imron's reading and listening routines), in case you're interested.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/22456-fluency-proficiency-etcsome-insight-please/#comment-182682

(There are many more, this forum has lots of info about every aspect of studying Chinese.)

And there's also a list of podcasts with transcripts somewhere around.