Speed of speaking

[Flickserve]

Native Chinese can be pretty fast to shadow. 

 

If you don't speak your native language that fast, is it really practical to try and shadow in a second language at a faster pace?

[imron]

Who are you trying to shadow?  A newsreader will be very fast, and politician will be much slower.

[DavyJonesLocker]

Don't see why you would need to speed up. Just speak at your normal pace as you would in your native language (if comfortable doing so) People naturally speak at different paces in all languages so no "standard" as such. 

[yueni]

You can adjust speaking speed a few different ways:

1) If you're playing a digital file, your digital file player might have the ability to slow down the speed of the file.

2) Pick a speaker or genre who speaks more slowly. Newscasters always speak really fast, for example. They would be a bad choice. 

 

Shadowing also shouldn't be done with new material all the time. Shadowing material you're extremely familiar with is beneficial, because you can then work on what you actually want to improve. Working with material you're unfamiliar with means that you're never sure what the speaker is saying next, so you're expending more brain-effort/energy trying to guess what comes next. Working with material you're familiar with means that you can anticipate what the speaker is going to say next, so you can spend more effort focusing on whatever it is you are trying to correct (e.g. saying your 3rd tones, collocation, etc).

 

When I was shadowing I would spend one whole week working only one 30 minute speech. In some practice sessions, I would only be working on 5 minutes of the speech on repeat. You don't need a large quantity of new material to do shadowing. You just really need about 1-2 hours of appropriate material, and just keep using it on repeat. I've spent an entire hour-long practice session just working on a 1-2 minute segment of the speech, because it contained certain things that were particularly problematic for me. So I isolated that section, and just shadowed it on repeat while recording myself, and then listened to the recording, noticed what I did badly in comparison, and then repeating the process all over again.

 

For speeches where the speaker was way the hell too fast for me to shadow word-for-word, I would practice the following things:

1. summarizing the meaning of what they said in Chinese (probably only useful if you are learning interpreting, like I was)
2. only picking out word collocations or grammatical connectors. e.g. which words go together. So I wouldn't necessarily shadow the whole speech, but rather speech structures or parts of speech. For example, 因为……，但是…… (cause-effect, grammar)；奠定……基础 (verb-noun collocation)...... the choices are endless.

When you're working on #2, it's really difficult to do with brand new content, because you have no way to anticipate what the speaker is saying. It's better to do that with an audio or video file that you are familiar with. Also, it's better to just work on a small section of audio or video at a time. In this case, quality of study is definitely prioritized over quantity and variety of material.

 

[mungouk]

5 hours ago, Flickserve said:

If you don't speak your native language that fast

 

But maybe you do, in terms of syllables per second... 

[Flickserve]

4 hours ago, imron said:

Who are you trying to shadow? 

 

Chinesepod intermediate. New thing I am trying. 

 

4 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

People naturally speak at different paces in all languages so no "standard" as such. 

 

17 minutes ago, mungouk said:

But maybe you do, in terms of syllables per second... 

 

I feel I have slowed down in delivery of speech. I am around English as a second language people most of the time. In my job, I have to speak very clearly which means that I can't really go that fast. Sometimes there is teaching and you can't go fast. 

 

3 hours ago, yueni said:

Shadowing also shouldn't be done with new material all the time. Shadowing material you're extremely familiar with is beneficial, because you can then work on what you actually want to improve. Working with material you're unfamiliar with means that you're never sure what the speaker is saying next, so you're expending more brain-effort/energy trying to guess what comes next. Working with material you're familiar with means that you can anticipate what the speaker is going to say next, so you can spend more effort focusing on whatever it is you are trying to correct (e.g. saying your 3rd tones, collocation, etc).

 

When I was shadowing I would spend one whole week working only one 30 minute speech. In some practice sessions, I would only be working on 5 minutes of the speech on repeat. You don't need a large quantity of new material to do shadowing. You just really need about 1-2 hours of appropriate material, and just keep using it on repeat. I've spent an entire hour-long practice session just working on a 1-2 minute segment of the speech, because it contained certain things that were particularly problematic for me. So I isolated that section, and just shadowed it on repeat while recording myself, and then listened to the recording, noticed what I did badly in comparison, and then repeating the process all over again.

 

 

Sorry I should have said I am trying out Chinesepod intermediate. I entirely agree with you about focusing on small segments. I was having difficulty with some parts and it seemed very fast even when selecting one with familiar (or maybe not that familiar) vocabulary. 

 

3 hours ago, yueni said:

Also, it's better to just work on a small section of audio or video at a time. In this case, quality of study is definitely prioritized over quantity and variety of material.

 

 

Got it. Thanks! 

[Shelley]

You could try using Slow Chinese. It has a news item or story read slowly, not so slow as to be annoying. Also done at normal speed with some free transcripts. I am using my tablet (PC being repaired) so links difficult. Have search for it.

[Flickserve]

On 5/15/2018 at 8:34 PM, Shelley said:

You could try using Slow Chinese. It has a news item or story read slowly, not so slow as to be annoying. Also done at normal speed with some free transcripts. I am using my tablet (PC being repaired) so links difficult. Have search for it.

 

 

True. They do normal speed? It doesn't matter though. I would probably pay somebody to read at normal speeds for me anyway just to get another version to practice listening skills.

 

On 5/15/2018 at 2:50 PM, yueni said:

Shadowing also shouldn't be done with new material all the time. Shadowing material you're extremely familiar with is beneficial, because you can then work on what you actually want to improve.

 

Just to report, it has got better. Obviously, I got a bit anxious too quickly and didn't give myself enough practice. For shadowing, I noticed some parts of a sentence I might have more problems articulating. I do about ten to twenty reps of the problem area, give it a rest and then go back to it again.

 

Spoke to an old language partner - not spoken for a long time. She said my pronunication had improved even though I feel I haven't put proper effort into exercises like this as such nor taken that many lessons over many months. This is only after three days work - got to be wary of the law of decreasing returns when trying to keep up motivation.

 

[yueni]

3 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Just to report, it has got better. Obviously, I got a bit anxious too quickly and didn't give myself enough practice. For shadowing, I noticed some parts of a sentence I might have more problems articulating. I do about ten to twenty reps of the problem area, give it a rest and then go back to it again.

 

Just like all forms of language learning, it takes time and practice. Glad to hear that it's working for you, even though it's only been three days in! 

 

Just remember that each time you work on a shadowing section, it's best to focus on one thing at a time. Often, people try to work on correcting everything (pronunciation, grammar, etc.), and end up going nowhere, because there's just so much to work on. Keep it up! Look forward to hearing your take on shadowing and on hearing your improvements after a few months. =)