How to improve listening comprehension

[叫我小山]

I've learned the HSK vocabulary levels except level 6, including approx. 500 random words from life and I feel it's a good amount of vocabulary to start venturing out to native-level sources to learn. With this, I've recently been watching a lot of TV shows, (欢乐颂 anyone? lol) and movies including lots of children's programs. My problem is I find that I understand almost all of the words when I read the subtitles, but without pausing and reading, I understand maybe 20% just from listening. The words that they are saying are ones I've learned and know, but when it is spoken it's just a barrage of sounds that I don't "get". I know that this is an unbalance between listening and reading ability, but is there some way to perk up listening skills? I know people will say, "listen more", but is there any way to effectively do that? I feel embarrassed when people ask how long have I been learning 普通话 (2 years) and they begin speaking some regular, everyday speech and I don't understand. I have been learning the Most Common 3000 Characters (currently at #1050) and the HSK level words but I just feel like it's not progressing...

[Publius]

Summoning @imron to give you the "train what you want to learn" speech

[amytheorangutan]

Probably start from listening to simpler dialogues like intermediate/advance Chinesepod or something similar. Dialogues or podcasts that are made for intermediate or advance learners. 

[Flickserve]

Sometimes you don't get it because you don't expect the words to come up, even though you have learnt the words. This is field practice. 

 

just listen again and again. When you don't understand people, ask them to say it slower!

 

for TV make a point of listening first. Then looking at the subtitle.

[DavyJonesLocker]

You could try Chinese Pod, their lessons are good, ........ if you can stick listening to the cheesy presenters

 

12 hours ago, 叫我小山 said:

I feel embarrassed when people ask how long have I been learning 普通话 (2 years) and they begin speaking some regular, everyday speech and I don't understand.

 

Do like 90% of people do and lie about how long they have been learning. 

[LuDaibola]

44 minutes ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

Do like 90% of people do and lie about how long they have been learning. 

 

Ha, ha...I'll have to keep this in mind.  I've got the added dilemma of sometimes wanting to use the age card to explain why I'm not further along after so much study but then feeling reluctant to do this as I don't want to add to the aging stereotypes/prejudice that most of us older folks experience.  The truth is that virtually everyone experiences cognitive decline when they age but the rate at which this occurs varies so widely that no one can speak for anyone else really.  I've found that the easiest way to avoid discouragement is to simply measure my progress against where I was a few months ago.  And in December of 2016, I remembered only a few phrases from my childhood while, now, I can hold an, admittedly stilted, conversation about lots of things.  Onwards and sideways.

[imron]

12 hours ago, Publius said:

Summoning @imron to give you the "train what you want to learn" speech

Ok, here goes.

 

You get good at the things that you practice (assuming correct practice).

 

If you want to get good at a specific skill it's more effective if you practice that skill rather than practicing other skills that may or may not have overlap with the skill you're trying to learn, because by practicing the skill you'll find out where your flaws are and have concrete feedback on what to fix.  It might be more painful to practice that thing - especially if practicing it constantly exposes just how bad you are at it, but if you don't practice the specific skill you'll end up practicing things that don't address the problem at hand and you'll never see much improvement.

 

For example, you say you have the vocabulary needed to understand most of what you are listening to, you just can't process it in time.  This indicates that any activity that focuses on increasing vocab rather than increasing your processing speed of that vocab is not going to be very useful.  You could double your vocabulary but if you haven't increased your processing speed it will all be for naught and you'll still only be understanding ~20% of what you hear.  This is why you should train what you want to learn.

 

On to the specifics of what I think is the problem at hand.

 

When you are trying to listen to something, you need to devote a certain amount of brainpower to the following things:

 

1. processing sounds

2. mapping the sound to a syllable

3. mapping the syllables to a words - drawing from knowledge of vocabulary, speech patterns and current context/topic

4. identifying word boundaries and readjusting from 3 (or even 2) if necessary

5. processing the meaning of those words when appearing in sequence together.

 

If that process is too slow then by the time you reach point 5, the original speaker has moved on and you have either keep going with point 5 to understand one small fragment (at the expense of missing steps 1-4 for the next few fragments) or restart the process 1-5 for what is currently being said and abandoning point 5 for what was previously said.

 

It's a vicious cycle where interruptions at any point affect your ability to understand, which leads to increased interruptions for later parts of the speech.

 

13 hours ago, 叫我小山 said:

I know people will say, "listen more", but is there any way to effectively do that?

Yes there is!

 

The fix is to speed up steps 1-4, so that the bulk of your brainpower can be spent on step 5.

 

The best way to speed up steps 1-4 is drilling and repetition, drilling and repetition and then more drilling and repetition (more on the exact steps in just a bit).  In recent years, rote drilling and repetition have fallen out of popularity in language learning circles in favour of 'smart' methods, and I used to feel the same way about it until I started doing it and had good results from it.

 

The reason is that drilling things repeatedly makes whatever you are drilling an automatic reflex, and once it's an automatic reflex you don't need to spend much brainpower on it - it just comes automatically.

 

If you drill 100% listening comprehension of phrases spoken at regular speed, building up to sentences and then paragraphs you'll make steps 1-4 automatic, and you'll be able to devote most of your brainpower to understanding the semantics of what is being said rather than spending a large amount of effort on processing the sounds and splitting them into words.

 

As for specifics, this post provides specific steps for how to drill listening (it's what got me first started on drilling).  Make sure to read the follow up posts later in the thread by the same author.  I've also written up my own thoughts in a post here.  Note, those posts are years old now and the resources listed in them no longer exist.  See this thread on potential replacements for 锵锵三人行.

 

Once you've found a good source of material, you then just need to drill your listening every day for a sustained period of time (from my own experience, it'll take a minimum of 1 month of daily drilling to see initial results, and 3 months to notice clear improvements).  It's also better to do a little bit every day, than longer amounts every other day (or every few days).

 

The above method for drilling listening will bore you to tears, but it will return dividends if you keep at it.

[querido]

On 4/21/2018 at 8:12 AM, imron said:

Make sure to read the follow up posts later in the thread by the same author.

 

From that thread, a quick summary of his/her method, workload and progress is here.