Recall tips for listen-and-repeat? (HSKK)

[mungouk]

I was interested in what @Tomsima was saying in this blog about student interpreters training to remember long sections of speech and it led me to wonder if there are any specific techniques you can use to hold a sentence in your head when doing the listen-and-repeat questions in HSKK.

 

At the moment I'm having trouble recalling even sentences as short as 我们的生活每天都在发生变化。

 

It feels as though as soon as I hear a word I'm not sure of, it throws my short-term memory off track and I forget most of the rest of the sentence.  In theory I should be able to repeat the sounds I've heard, but if feels like understanding is "getting in the way".

 

Conversely, hearing a common sequence of words such as 每天多， 他们的， 昨天晚上， is easier to recall because I hear and remember it as a single "chunk".

 

I need to improve drastically on these questions before I sit HSKK 中级 in 3 weeks' time... I'm doing the tests with my teacher in my 1:1 lessons, with her reading the questions out and helping me out, and this is useful.

 

I'm also starting to realise I probably need to learn all the HSK 4 level vocabulary to avoid stumbling over words like 发生 which I hadn't come across yet, so I will work on that.

 

But I wondered if anyone has any tips, tricks or techniques to share which could improve listening-and-repeating?

 

[Tomsima]

I know it sounds obvious, but the more familiar you are with the contents of a sentence, the easier it is to remember, the deeper it will sit there in your brain. So once the sentence 我们的生活每天都在发生变化 is so familiar it is not a vocab problem, nor a grammar problem, you are only left needing to remember three things: 'life-everyday-change'.

Three weeks is not a lot of time: do shadowing of hsk audio constantly every day, make cloze flashcards and study every day. Good luck

[mungouk]

Thanks!  I'm not entirely sure what "shadowing" means.

 

From searching online some people seem to suggest it means "listening and speaking at the same time" (exactly the same time), whereas others say it means "listening and repeating [afterwards]".

 

Any views on this?

Anyway I've been diving into the sample HSKK audio files I have, looping and repeating using Audacity, and I'm realising most of the sample sentences are not as long as I feared.  Vocab is still an issue though, so I'm still focusing on that.