The Power of Listening

[shiaosan]

When learning Mandarin, many people are facing these two common problem:

1. When they read a text, they understand. When they listen to it, they don't or not as well as when they read.

2. They are always afraid that their pronuciation isn't good enough. The joke of addressing mother as horse seems has a greater impact on people than I though of. (It actually never happened. I guarantee you!) There was a girl I met last year. She told me she took some Mandarin lessons before. I said that was good and asked if she liked it. Then she told me that at the end she hated it because she was so afraid to speak because her teacher corected her pronuciations of every word when she was trying to speak. It was like setting up a mental block that she will never be able to say those tones right or pronuce 'j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r' in the teacher's way (the pefect way). She cried once or twice and eventually gave up learning. That was really sad. I told her it really was the teacher's fault. That teacher has no teaching ability but to demonstrate perfect pronuciations.

These two problems can actually be traced to the same source: Students probably didn't do enough listening exercises. This is a very transparent answer to the first problem, but seldom do people realize that listening can help (truely help) their pronunciations and their understanding of this language in general.

Most of the time, students are very vulnerable because they really rely on teachers to guide them and help them. So how can teachers truely help them?

Over the time, I have developed a theroy in regarding the above two mentioned problems. It worked remarkablly well with my students: increasing their listening exercises.

There are certain things teachers need to pay attention to is:

1. Don't let the students listen to TV all the time, especially not Intro or Basic level students.

2. Listening script must contain no new words or a maximum one or two new words to students.

With the help of Grace, we have pull the resources together and published Mandarin Express Intro Level A workbook. It has 55 compatible listening exercises. Intro Level B workbook first draft will be finished around end of Sep.

After a certain amount of listening exercises, I found my students not only improved their pronunciations, but also more confident in speaking, and as a bonus to me, they have greater faith in me as well.

[roddy]

1. When they read a text, they understand. When they listen to it, they don't or not as well as when they read.

That's common to any language learning - hardly a feature of Chinese learning alone. It's also one that is complicated by the nature of the Chinese writing system - it's possible for reading / writing skills to be much better / worse than speaking / listening than you would expect for a more phonetically written language.

I can't agree with what you are saying. Simply listening isn't going to be enough to improve pronunciation, except for the small subset of students with a good awareness of phonetics, who can identify and reproduce the sounds they hear. The majority of people will need drilling and correction - and at that point you aren't doing listening exercises any more, you are doing pronunciation exercises.

Apart from that all you seem to be saying is that listening exercises help listening skills

[fenlan]

I think to learn Chinese you need to be prepared to make mistakes! I remember one girl on my course spent her year abroad in China travelling the country extensively, screaming at the Chinese in English wherever she went. She was supposedly studying Chinese at university, but didn't say a word of Chinese during her year in China. She found travelling very wearing as a result!

[skylee]

#1 was a good ad... I read through all of it ...

[shiaosan]

"drilling and correction"

That is indeed very necessary for everybody. The problem is that's all you ever get sometimes. And that makes learning really dreary.

Also, everybody, even a person on the street can help you with drilling and correction. That's the easy part.

By listening proper text, you increased your awarness of the sounds, and you will find you don't need that much of drilling and correction any more! What a liberation!

[roddy]

I think you give the man in the street far too much credit - I've had taxi drivers tell me I sound rubbish, but not yet had one who can tell me where to put my tongue to sort it out. And what's a proper text for this purpose?

[shiaosan]

Granted. Texi drivers might not be able to teach you where to put your tongue, but they give you a possitive feedback when they understand you especially when you didn't pronuce "perfectly". That is a starting point of positive learning.

The proper text comes in to help you little by little understand the whole picture of every aspects of Mandarin. Not throw in a dry drill constantly, neither put you through a listening task which has too many new words for you.

Eventually you can discuss about world issue with taxi driver. Isn't that one of the pupose of learning Mandarin?

[nipponman]

I think what he is saying is that people need more experience processing natural chinese. And I think to some extent he is right (though, it was a good ad:mrgreen: ). Listening to the news isn't the best way to get a feel for natives. I think your experience roddy is i the best one (other than being born a native), you actually live and work in china. So either, you cover your face and walk away slowly when somebody talks to you, or you do what I think you do and listen, respond in kind, and communicate. I think that is the best way, we should all struggle to get an experience similar to that, by getting friends, etc.

nipponman

[flyinryan76]

I am very interested in what all of you wrote above... I am in the process of trying to learn chinese now and am experiencing some frustration. Shiaosan do you have any of those tapes/ books I could buy? Does anybody have any suggestions? Thanks!

[Weronika]

Hi flyinryan76

Practical chinese reader, hanyu jiaocheng books online free!

It's for absolut beginners.

www.chinesepod.com is a good thing, to hear mp3 it's for beginners too.

HANYU JIAOCHENG

http://www.1th.net/goodchinese/2006/ebook/ch1.CHM

http://www.1th.net/goodchinese/2006/ebook/ch1-2.CHM

http://www.1th.net/goodchinese/2006/ebook/ch.chm

PRACTICAL CH reader

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/10-is-chinese-grammar-easy-dont-you-just-love-chinese-words945

http://ktmatu.com/chinese/practical-chinese-reader/

http://ktmatu.com/chinese/practical-chinese-reader/links.html

http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/PCRopen/selftest.htm ...

veronika

[gamerfu]

shiaosan, you say you have a book. I am interested in your book, please send me information. I am learning "bopomofo".

[Shadowdh]

Thanks for those links Veronika... most helpful...

[Roee]

"Texi drivers might not be able to teach you where to put your tongue, but they give you a possitive feedback when they understand you especially when you didn't pronuce "perfectly". That is a starting point of positive learning. "

In Shanghai it seems that a Taxi driver would have a better chance of understanding my Mandarin if I pronounce it with a heavy Southern/Shanghainese accent than standard accent. Not to mention pronuncing with the wrong tones etc. Beware of whom you learn with and what you learn...

[bomaci]

I can't agree with what you are saying. Simply listening isn't going to be enough to improve pronunciation, except for the small subset of students with a good awareness of phonetics, who can identify and reproduce the sounds they hear. The majority of people will need drilling and correction - and at that point you aren't doing listening exercises any more, you are doing pronunciation exercises.

Apart from that all you seem to be saying is that listening exercises help listening skills

I think that listening alot definetely helps with your pronounciation. Furthermore I think the only way to learn intonation in a language is to listen a lot and listen over and over to the same material. Learning the sounds is more difficult and they make take some practice to develop. But in my view drilling tones over and over with a teacher is not very fruitful. I think your time is better spent listening to short dialouges over and over until you can hear them in your head when taking a shower If you can't hear the differences between the tones you won't have much chance of reproducing them correctly.

[wrbt]

I agree with bomaci. I believe the best use of time is listening to dialogues with native speakers as much as possible. For me after hearing something enough times I can recall (hear it) it without much thought and it just flows... especially subtle things like switching tones on bu or yi.

[atitarev]

Mandarin or another Chinese dialect takes an extra effort from European language speakers, that's for sure, IMHO, of course. Even Japanese or Korean, two East-Asian languages are much easier too follow, if you know the words they pronounce.

If a teacher can upset by correcting too much then the desire to learn wasn't that great. The teacher MUST correct and correct consistently until it gets closer for understanding (acceptable, not perfect) but he/she should do it nicely. I would change the teacher, as the worst case scenario.

I hear a lot of the other extremes, not correcting at all. My classmates pronounce zhu as ju, shi and xi often sound the same, tones are a mess (I am not perfect but I am paying attention). The teacher most of the time ignores such mistakes, she learned to understand such an accent. I find that Chinese people better understand when you mix up zhi and zi, or shi and si, like the southern dialects but won't understand you if you make mistakes like I mentioned before.

Pronunciation is very important for understanding, too, IMHO.

For learning tones I found drills that have different tone combinations very helpful.

Memorising different patterns is helpful, e.g.:

Once you learn how to pronounce the tones for [POP=dìtú map]地图[/POP], you can pronounce [POP=liànxí practice, exercise]练习[/POP] - the same tone pattern. So if you see another word with the 4th tone followed by the 2nd tone, think about "map" or "exercise".

EDIT (fixed typo, thanks HashiriKata)

[bomaci]

The teacher MUST correct and correct consistently until it gets closer for understanding (acceptable, not perfect) but he/she should do it nicely

.

Maybe some correction is good but I am pretty convinced that this method is very inefficient for learning the tones in Mandarin. If you can't hear the difference between the tones you will never be able to reproduce them correctly. If the teacher has to repeat each sentence 100 times and the student still doesn't pronounce correctly it is just a waste of time. The student should train his ears first to distinguish between the tones.

[atitarev]

The teacher shouldn't bring the student to frustration, what I mean is correction shouldn't stop and teacher should look for other methods if one is not working.

Example of what I mean: a student says a phrase incorrectly. The teacher corrects. The student is able to correct himself - fine. Next mistake - same process. Keep correcting (of course it should have a limit of time) If it doesn't work with fill sentences shorten to 1-2 words better have some progress than none.

I don't mean to keep trying on the same sentence if it doesn't work, it won't work!

Example 2: The student is not able to correct the mistake (because he can't hear the difference). Leave him alone but think of methods to exercise. Attempt to correct again next time but don't give up or assume that the student will learn later on his own, that's what the teacher is for!

The student should train his ears first to distinguish between the tones.

He may not be able to train his ears alone, the teacher should help. Why not focus just on that - training ears

[HashiriKata]

So if you see another word with the 4th tone followed by the 3rd tone[/b'], think about "map" or "exercise".

No, I don't think this is correct

By the way, I think the best method to get the tones right is the learners themselves first try to hear the difference of the 4 tones, using very simple syllables as practising materials. Once the learners have done this, the corrections by teachers/ helpers will have a better chance to be effective.

[atitarev]

Of course, a self-motivated person achieves more and if they put the effort in themselves first, only ask a teacher when they are not sure.

What is wrong with my example, anyway? Tones in single syllable words are much easier to master than 2-, 3- or more syllable words or full phrases. Usually this stage (single syllable words) is covered pretty quickly - just 4 tones. It's when tones are used in combination when a mix-up starts.