Advanced Learners (B2+-C2), did you have any systematic method you felt helped improvement for speaking / listening?

[avren]

I would love to hear some anecdotes of people at the higher levels and what they felt was especially effective and useful when studying. Right now I would say I am maybe B1 (I could pass HSK 5 without preparing). I am really seeking systematic approaches, as right now my motivation isn't at its highest; I am trying to find a method to improve my listening / speaking that I can just go and grind out a few hours each day. 

 

In the past what I have done as an example of systematic approaches:

 

Beginner stages I 3 months at a time of minimal 1 hour a day working through textbooks, I did this maybe 9 months.

Intermediate stage (probably where I am now) I did multiple 3 month challenges for minimal 1 hour a day:

3 months transcribing videos / audio (and then check against subtitles)

6 months reading novels (simpler ones like 活着 using pleco's aid along the way)

6 months speaking with my girlfriend about any topic I could find

All along the way I also used anki for about a year and a half before I got sick of it (got through maybe 3000 words this way)

3 months writing out grammar patterns from grammar wiki and creating my own sentences

3 months writing (by hand) every sentence I didn't understand in various tv shows

 

There's probably a lot more but I hope you get the general idea of what I mean as a systematic approach. I am looking for something I can get up and just know, like, yup today I have to work through 2 hours of transcribing, and if I do it every day for 3 months, I am going to improve. The problem I find I am running into sometimes is I think up a plan, like I am going to discuss a topic for 5 minutes every day and then correct all the mistakes. But then I wonder what are the specifics of this plan? It's still to broad; what topic? How do I correct it? Do I preplan the topic or do I just find "top 150 common topics" and just talk into the mic? If I get stuck unable to describe a scenario, what do I do? Do I pause and figure it out, write it down, turn it into a flash card? Or do I just go with the flow? 

 

Anyways, I would love to hear if any advanced learners out there had anything systematic they did that they felt had results in terms of improving listening, vocab, speaking. Also I am in China for another 6 months, I am really excited about that, hoping to take advantage.

 

Thanks everyone! 

 

P.S. I don't mind less advanced or intermediate people's input as well, especially if they have succeeded already with other languages, because I don't consider this question language specific.

 

 

 

[道艺]

one of my favorite things was to do polls/surveys. I'd make a 3-5 question survey based around a theme/group of vocabulary I wanted to make concrete. Then I'd set a goal of X ppl/day or week. People I'd had less to no interactions were better to gauge my ability to adapt to 'different chinese' and getting my pronunciation down to have most people understand me off the bat

[johnvaradero]

23 hours ago, avren said:

All along the way I also used anki for about a year and a half before I got sick of it (got through maybe 3000 words this way)

 

If I understand you correctly and your vocabulary in fact consists of around 3000 words, then the single most important thing for you would be to learn a lot of new words. Vocabulary is the fundament of reading, listening, writing and speaking. If you go from 3000 to 10 000 words, for example, you will see a significant increase in your overall language ability. You can do this by following frequency lists or by learning new words you encounter, but generally speaking the higher the frequency of an unknown word the more useful is it to learn it.

 

I still remember when I read my first book, I had a vocabulary of around 4000 words and it was incredibly slow and difficult. At 10 000 words, reading a book got so much easier. Now I'm around 15 000 words and reading is mostly smooth and very enjoyable. I still regularly encounter unknown words, but usually their meaning becomes clear from context. And in the same way as reading, other skills improve as well in the process of increasing your vocabulary.

 

Of course just learning new words is not enough, you also need to spend as much time as possible listening, reading, speaking and writing, but since you're used to reading books and speaking with your girlfriend it seems like you got this covered. 

[imron]

For listening, I found following this method very helpful.  Keep reading that thread to see the follow up posts.

 

The main difficulty is in finding content with transcripts.  If you do it everyday, then within 3 months you should see noticeable progress.

[柯林]

Thanks everyone for your feedback! And apologies for replying on a different account, I forgot I had this one (Which I intend to use instead of avren).

 

I really appreciate the input, and actually a few days ago Imron had sent me an extended trial of his Chinese Text Analyzer as well as some amazing advice, which he has again linked to a part of it here. I have committed to giving the method a shot, where I will find audio clips about daily life or podcasts, and listen, put the text into the analyzer, learn frequent vocab, then just learn 10 (ish?) words a day. 

 

Actually I am thinking about setting up a post to track my progress with the method and how it develops to get other peoples input on how to further improve the fine details, so that if anyone in the future wants a super concrete method they could follow along. So far I have already started and while following along with the advice given, there are lots of question marks I want to tackle, such as bumping into words that I feel are pretty useless or way too specific, should I bother adding that to my 10 words of the day or make the call to skip it in favour of something I deem more useful for the time being (I am leaning towards yes). Actually I already have quite a few questions about the specifics (another is about audio content selection) with possible solutions or would love to get input on as well.

 

Apologies for any weird formatting, on my phone right now.