How to Improve Production Skills?

[arain]

Hi all, recently I've realized that my Chinese skill level is very imbalanced (reading/listening comprehension is way better than speaking/writing skills), and I'd like to fix this. Unfortunately I don't have anyone to practice speaking or writing Chinese with on a daily basis, so what other options are there (that don't involve getting a tutor, etc) to improve?

 

I'm currently at an intermediate level comprehension-wise. It feels like I regress to a beginner level when talking, since it takes me forever just to think of how to respond. Writing is a little better, probably because I have more time to process. I'm thinking of finding some native material (e.g. talk shows, daily life sitcoms, podcasts) and working with their use of grammar, common collocations, etc; someone recommended to me《实说实话》, for example. I was also thinking of keeping a regular journal, but this might not be as helpful since I wouldn't know if I was using correct/natural language.

[Flickserve]

You can try the hellotalk app. 

 

Plenty of people to practice Chinese.

 

How did you improve your listening comprehension in the past? 

 

 

[Fen]

Hi, I have been studying Chinese for about three months and I'm pretty well rounded on each point. I'd recommend doing a few things for writing: First, read. Obviously you'll pick up vocabulary as you read that will help improve your writing. The next: write. It sounds simple, but it kind of is. I have used a few resources to aid my writing and target specific facets of the Chinese language, namely: a comprehensive introductory Chinese grammar book, a book filled with sentence patterns (phrasing by which sentences can be formed and case-specific thoughts expressed), and my own notes. I have recently been keeping a log of adjectives that I find useful, as well as conjunctions and connection particles (另外，其中，于是，则) to name a few. When I want to write I refer to my notes and sentence patterns, as well as the nouns and other words I recall from my reading. Another thing, although it may sound weird, is discussing the language with yourself. Read something and explain each part of the sentence / paragraph. Be as technical as possible, that way you can be sure you understand it. One place I can do this is on Italki.com - I haven't spent any money there, I just browse the Chinese posts and look over the corrections. Sometimes there is insight there. ( Also you can post your own material and have native speakers correct it for free) When it comes to speaking, the only was to get better is to speak. You can try to speak with yourself, or get a program to speak to, but nothing beats a tutor or a native speaking friend that will pull you through the mud that is the early and intermediate stages of speaking (any) foreign language. Obviously, the best way to truly connect with the language (speaking-wise especially) is through immersion, but unless you have the money for a plane ticket or a weekend immersion workshop, you're probably better off just using a site like italki, takeslessons, or some equivalent. In the end, all progress is good progress. Having a strong hearing foundation, for example, is very important and will benefit you tremendously in communication. It will eventually even out. Good luck!

[arain]

I recently installed Hellotalk but I've yet to figure out the best way to use it. Maybe I'll start posting some moments.

 

Re: listening comprehension, it was some combination of growing up with some background in Chinese (I speak mediocre Cantonese at home and used to take Mandarin classes as a kid)¸ university classes, and watching TV shows/listening to podcasts/radio/etc.

[feihong]

To improve speaking, you must find people to speak with. Look for a meetup in your area or find a language exchange partner online (I recommend conversationexchange.com).

[arain]

@Fen Thanks for the tip re: iTalki, I didn't know you could post your own writing there. I might give that a shot.

@feihong I do go to a weekly meetup at my university but it tends to be hit or miss; either I have something to say, or people start talking about politics and other topics that are interesting but that I personally don't have comments about, and I end up just listening to them talk. It doesn't help that I'm not a great conversationalist in the first place.

 

For now, I think I'm looking for something more structured and reliable. I found a few other threads talking about shadowing audio to improve fluency and noting down grammar structures, vocabulary used, and so on, which seems like a good idea.

[edelweis]

1 hour ago, feihong said:

To improve speaking, you must find people to speak with.

 

I agree. There's no way to emulate the immediate feedback of being understood or not (and/or being corrected by the person you're talking to).

 

Talking to someone also has these aspects:

- the need to improvise depending on what the other person says/asks,

- the urgency to say something before they get tired of waiting for an answer,

 

Now that I think about it, I guess you could emulate these two points if you had a sufficiently varied bank of prompts and a timer?

I mean, draw a random prompt and give yourself less than 1 second to start a sentence. Record yourself. Then listen to yourself and hope you can spot and correct your own mistakes.

[Flickserve]

12 hours ago, arain said:

I recently installed Hellotalk but I've yet to figure out the best way to use it. Maybe I'll start posting some moments.

 

There's no shortage of Chinese people on Hellotalk. Post some moments up, write on your profile you are learning Chinese and you will start to get messages.

 

The trick is to find like-minded people to continually practice with.

 

There are some groups that people fall into (not an exclusive list):

- only text message

- mixture of voice and text messages

- those that only use English

- those that would like to converse real time.

 

As you can imagine, that last group is the smallest number of people. What I found is that people tend to have complicated minds so it's difficult to express exactly what you want so that after an initial conversation, it's a bit off putting to go through another stop-start conversation. It also goes for the other side that they cannot express exactly what they want as well. Then there are other factors such as time difference, work schedules, other life issues that decrease the amount of available time.

 

Language exchange does have a lot of problems. Paying for lessons where you get mostly chinese input is much more consistent, thus, I do recommend this very much so. There are various online tuition sites such as italki where some people charge very little for their time. If you are just looking for some listening and speaking practice, then community tutor on italki will do.

[feihong]

13 hours ago, arain said:

I do go to a weekly meetup at my university but it tends to be hit or miss; either I have something to say, or people start talking about politics and other topics that are interesting but that I personally don't have comments about, and I end up just listening to them talk. It doesn't help that I'm not a great conversationalist in the first place.

It's wonderful that your university has a weekly meetup and I think you should take advantage of it more. I don't mean you should force yourself to talk about things you aren't interested in though, instead you should look at it as an opportunity to network with like-minded people. Have you made any friends through the meetup? If so, ask them if they'd like to practice speaking one-on-one or in a smaller group.

[feihong]

10 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Language exchange does have a lot of problems. Paying for lessons where you get mostly chinese input is much more consistent, thus, I do recommend this very much so. There are various online tuition sites such as italki where some people charge very little for their time. If you are just looking for some listening and speaking practice, then community tutor on italki will do.

I think that language exchange is high effort but also high reward. If you put in the time to find a good language exchange partner, then you reap great gains in the long run. But it takes a lot of patience, because it takes time to develop the relationship  and you'll likely have to go through several partners until you find someone suitable. I should mention that meeting in person or even via Skype is overrated once you already have an established routine. I just do a weekly phone call with my language exchange partner and it works great for us.

 

I think a good strategy would be to pay for lessons so you can get consistent practice, but taper it off when you find a consistent language exchange partner.

[Flickserve]

5 hours ago, feihong said:

. But it takes a lot of patience, because it takes time to develop the relationship  and you'll likely have to go through several partners until you find someone suitable. I should mention that meeting in person or even via Skype is overrated once you already have an established routine. I just do a weekly phone call with my language exchange partner and it works great for us.

 

I think a good strategy would be to pay for lessons so you can get consistent practice, but taper it off when you find a consistent language exchange partner.

 

I’m only a low level learner. It’s easy for me to run out of things to say.