Listening Focus as Priority?

[rn1rnl]

Hello! I have been away for awhile due to University Study. I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on the topic of Listening and Speaking. I spoke with a man who can speak 7 languages past a B2 and some are at C2 level, including two of those Japenese and Cantonese. We talked awhile, and basically he is starting to switch his focus onto Listening. Getting huge amounts of exposure over and over again. He also advised to switch the flash cards to English first then Chinese. Including the Pinyin and Character to make sure Tones are correct. The reasoning for this was I was able to actually have to work in the language instead of passively recognizing Characters. Note- My main goal is to be able to have conversations with eaze not to read novels. That comes later as this is a life long journey. My question basically is what do you think of putting a big empasis of study on Listening, and doing speaking via Italki. 

 

I know the General Consensus is many people here like to read novels, and not to neglect characters, which I am not. I am simply not focusing on it at this moment. I did in the beginning. I have noticed that I have improved listening even within the two weeks I have been listening to textbook audio cd's over and over and over.

[stapler]

IMHO speaking and listening are infinitely more important than writing or reading. Learning a language requires you to 'internalise' it. It's like learning to ride a bike. A really really difficult bike. You can't "study" it in the way you can say chemistry. The problem is, most people "study" the language more than they "learn" it. And most "study" material is based around reading - as are all academic subjects. You can't internalise a language through reading; you can't read your way to fluency.

 

I can read Chinese novels or newspapers without much trouble. This has had little to no cross over to my ability to understand or speak Chinese. It's like this because learning to read is an easy task that mainly involves memorisation and learning some rules. Learning to speak and listen however requires large amounts of practice (as opposed to memorisation), that can be hard to get. It's hard to get this practice because unlike learning to read, you need to be brave, able to deal with embarrassment, and with pressure. Learning to read Chinese is a safe and cognitively non-intense exercise. As adult second language learners we're already mad good at the kind of memorisation needed for literacy. But we're a bit sucky at the endless practice and bravery needed for spoken fluency.

 

Chinese characters create the illusion that this is the most difficult part of the language. Native speakers - because they don't remember learning their own language - who only remember the difficulty of learning characters would probably help reinforce this idea. This is wrong. Whenever I read stuff on the internet about "Chinese is easy. The grammar is simple. You just need to master the tones and the characters" I generally get the feeling that they haven't learnt Chinese to a high level. It sounds like a beginner's/outsider's perspective.

 

In short, yes, prioritising listening and speaking is an absolute must. The struggle for most people isn't coming to this conclusion, but actually prioritising it.

[rn1rnl]

3 hours ago, stapler said:

IMHO speaking and listening are infinitely more important than writing or reading. Learning a language requires you to 'internalise' it.

This is so true. I have heard of many people able to read 5,000 characters and read most literature but have the worst speaking. My mindset right now is to spend vast majority of my time on Textbook Audio Cd's. My current routine is this: Listen to the dialog probably 10 times without the text, then another 10 with the text. It takes me a couple days to do this. Just to really focus on listening and comprehending, and notice new things about the language. Next phase is to study the text. Make sure I have 100% Comprehension squeezing everything I can out of the dialog/lesson sentences and vocab. Choosing what I can use, putting it into Anki. At the end, before I move on, I listen without the text. By this time, I should comprehend most if not all.  

 

This helps me to really "internalize" the language. In a short time, my listening has improved and I have found at times instantly replying to a question in Chinese without thinking as long as its simple. The thing with this approach is I dont pay attention to characters barely as I am focusing on hitting my tones right. I do put the English first then Chinese with pinyin and character. So I do see the character still.

[Flickserve]

9 hours ago, rn1rnl said:

I spoke with a man who can speak 7 languages past a B2 and some are at C2 level, including two of those Japenese and Cantonese. We talked awhile, and basically he is starting to switch his focus onto Listening

 

Why is he only now starting to switch to listening? Or is his speaking good but listening skills comparatively poorer?

 

But going past that, if you first look up learning languages on the Internet, almost everything you see about communicating is from the perspective of speaking and not listening. If anything is written about listening, its importance to the new language learner is not so apparent due the the mass of other information.

 

It is only natural that some people prefer written material. Speaking and listening take up a lot of brain power and social interaction skills. 

[Flickserve]

1 hour ago, rn1rnl said:

Listen to the dialog probably 10 times without the text, then another 10 with the text

 

I don't want to make you feel too bad but for me, I have to listen 50-100 times and I still don't feel like I have come close to internalising things. 

[rn1rnl]

17 minutes ago, Flickserve said:

Why is he only now starting to switch to listening? Or is his speaking good but listening skills comparatively poorer?

 

It's not that he started to switch to listening, his speaking ability improved quickly more so over the listening skills. Which is common in lanuages as I teach English as a Second Language. He found himself able to learn the language to speak, but the listening always hindered. 

 

2 minutes ago, Flickserve said:

I don't want to make you feel too bad but for me, I have to listen 50-100 times and I still don't feel like I have come close to internalising things. 

Oh no worries. The harder the dialogue, the more I listen. I probably listen way over 50+ times. I do know that it is not the time studied or how many times, its the compound effect that this has over time of doing it daily. My only problem is that my chinese characters will be lacking, but I have the basis of them already down. I just wanted to see if that it is sensible and reasonable to do it this way.

[Flickserve]

5 minutes ago, rn1rnl said:

I just wanted to see if that it is sensible and reasonable to do it this way.

 

Sure. If you do this and have interactions with native speakers,  then I think it will go well.  I don't have so much time and lack random contact with native mandarin speakers so for me,  the process is slower. 

[rn1rnl]

5 minutes ago, Flickserve said:

Sure. If you do this and have interactions with native speakers,  then I think it will go well.

Oh I do. I regularly schedule 3-4 skype Italki sessions a week along side 30mins to 1 hour of sit down study a day. Im planning on moving to China again in May 2019.

[Flickserve]

43 minutes ago, rn1rnl said:

regularly schedule 3-4 skype Italki sessions a week

That's a lot. Do you record and review the lessons? 

[abcdefg]

I live in China, 99.9% native environment. Converse (listening and speaking) like an adult without much trouble. Still read and write like a child. Maybe that will change some day and maybe it won't.

[Guest realmayo]

10 hours ago, stapler said:

It's like this because learning to read is an easy task that mainly involves memorisation and learning some rules

 

Only from one perspective. Mine was the opposite: talking was easy because suddenly I was living in China and for some reason lots of people wanted to talk to me, but I didn't know any Chinese at all. So that's how and why I started learning Chinese. Speaking is fun and easy and seems like the most natural thing for a human to be doing. Reading on the other hand: it took me years to start and even now I still have the sense of confronting some challenge each time I sit down to read the next chapter of a book. Whereas I wouldn't think twice about opening my gob and talking to someone in Chinese. It's just what you're used to I think.

 

As for the OP's question: given what you say in your post I think it's a great idea to prioritise listening right now, there's so much material available online these days, you can do it anywhere, and it should also help loads with your speaking, which you say you do on italki, sounds an excellent plan.

[Flickserve]

1 hour ago, abcdefg said:

I live in China, 99.9% native environment. Converse (listening and speaking) like an adult without much trouble

 

52 minutes ago, realmayo said:

talking was easy because suddenly I was living in China and for some reason lots of people wanted to talk to me

 

The Force is with you. The rest of us are on the dark side....

[abcdefg]

To be honest, some days it's easy and I'm golden. Seems like conversation is effortless and goes without a hitch. And then other days I struggle to understand and to make myself understood. When that happens, I pretend that it's just because I'm from a different part of China with a heavy regional accent. Tell myself that it's no big deal and I don't get hung up on it or discouraged.

 

Today in the park I asked an old man about the name of a flowering tree that I couldn't identify. He told me but I couldn't visualize the actual words. So we were standing there both "finger-writing" on our palms until we got it worked out. Seemed like the most natural thing in the world at the time. Only later did I realize that was probably some kind of communication milestone. 

 

海棠花

[imron]

47 minutes ago, abcdefg said:

So we were standing there both "finger-writing" on our palms until we got it worked out

If only he'd had a water brush

[Guest realmayo]

I should stress I don't mean my speaking is any good, just that I find it a natural thing to do in Chines, whereas reading still makes me shudder for a few seconds before getting down to it.

[Publius]

23 hours ago, stapler said:

Chinese characters create the illusion that this is the most difficult part of the language. Native speakers - because they don't remember learning their own language - who only remember the difficulty of learning characters would probably help reinforce this idea. This is wrong. Whenever I read stuff on the internet about "Chinese is easy. The grammar is simple. You just need to master the tones and the characters" I generally get the feeling that they haven't learnt Chinese to a high level. It sounds like a beginner's/outsider's perspective.

Victor Mair, sinologist and main contributor to the ABC Dictionary, seems to have a different opinion. Here's from his scathing comment about ShaoLan Hsueh's Chineasy:

Quote

Her performance on TED is prefaced by the following remark:

    For foreigners, learning to speak Chinese is a hard task. But learning to read the beautiful, often complex characters of the Chinese written language may be less difficult.
Quite the contrary, Chinese is the easiest language I ever learned to speak, but the writing system is by far the hardest I've ever had to grapple with.

(He is a devoted proponent of total romanization, which in my opinion is delusional, so he's probably biased, but we also have abcdefg and realmayo's testimony.)

 

I think you come to the conclusion that reading/writing is easier than listening/speaking because you are not in a immersion environment. Surrounding yourself with exchange students and skype tutors is not true immersion; having to conduct your daily life in the target language is. Different experience, different conclusion.

 

But I agree that anyone claiming Chinese (or any language) is easy is either trying to sell something or haven't reached a certain level. And as learner we must identify the "shortest plank of the barrel" and put some effort into fixing it.

[Flickserve]

1 hour ago, Publius said:

think you come to the conclusion that reading/writing is easier than listening/speaking because you are not in a immersion environment

 

Of course. Analogous to those millions of Chinese students studying English for 高考. 

[rn1rnl]

On 3/23/2017 at 11:21 PM, Flickserve said:

That's a lot. Do you record and review the lessons? 

I do not record. If I want to measure my progress, I do but otherwise no. If there are vocab that come up, I have them type it out with  character/pinyin/english. Time is better spent elsewhere building up vocab/finding new sentences/listening to dialogue. If we create a dialogue, I will record that dialogue of them speaking it so I can listen over and over to it.

 

16 hours ago, Publius said:

 

I think you come to the conclusion that reading/writing is easier than listening/speaking because you are not in a immersion environment.

Even with this, it does not mean speaking/comprehending. I lived in China for about 7-8 months in Shanghai interacting with locals every day. I couldn't understand anything besides recognizing 什么 and few of the very basic words or sentences. It wasn't till I left back to the USA to finish up my degree that I improved a lot. Especially in the beginning stages, you really can't learn from immersion. Maybe your brain may get used to hearing the language more, but in terms of ability that requires sit down study time I think. That's why I am putting a focus on listening to dialogues over and over and over. If your listening can improve above all your other skills, then you can naturally learn in an immersive environment, and it won't be long till you find your speaking ability increasing as well.

[Flickserve]

23 hours ago, rn1rnl said:

Especially in the beginning stages, you really can't learn from immersion.

 

I found the same thing when arriving in HK. Everybody speaking Cantonese, everybody saying you will pick it up by immersion. everyday being exposed to Cantonese and six months later, practically no progress. I got some private lessons (more in desperation), recorded those lessons (in those days it was tape!), had the book, listened again and again, asked my colleagues to repeat the sentences in the books in quiet moments and somehow started accelerating from there starting to notice patterns. Picking up Mandarin has not been so easy. Because I suddenly accelerated learning in Cantonese, and daily environmental input, I didn't realise it was listening skills being the trigger to my success. And because I didn't realise that, the initial stages of Mandarin was a slow and frustrating process. in the last six months with huge increase in repetitive listening practice (with the aid of recordings), I feel much more comfortable with learning Mandarin, even in a non-immersive environment.

[rn1rnl]

1 hour ago, Flickserve said:

I didn't realise it was listening skills being the trigger to my success.

I am starting to find this out as well! The language is becoming easier and easier for me day by day when I spend majority of time simply listening to dialogues. Its hard to sit there for 30-45 minutes just listening over and over, but it is definately helping. Speaking is becoming easier and easier. I think your brain naturally adjusts to the language as you listen more.

 

1 hour ago, Flickserve said:

the initial stages of Mandarin was a slow and frustrating process.

I know how this is! I am in the stages where it feels like no progress is being made, but you know there is. I remember that in the beginning just saying "My name is...." was a success!