Why am I advanced for some content, but basically a beginner for others?

[黄有光]

I know the title question seems really obvious to answer, but bear with me.

 

I have a passive vocabulary of approximately 20.000 words, as estimated by Chinese Text Analyzer. I can understand advanced comprehensible input videos like this one perfectly (in fact I would say that video is comfortably below my listening level); I am starting to understand radio news broadcasts (my listening comprehension is still maturing, but I feel confident this is a listening comprehension issue and not a vocabulary issue, since I can comfortably read most news articles about topics of interest to me). I recently watched the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender in Mandarin, and was able to comfortably follow every episode without subtitles --- though I did not understand every word of every dialogue. I have read novels in Chinese, both native material, and material that has been translated from other languages. 

 

But yesterday, I tried to watch an episode of 百妖谱, and listening comprehension plummeted to near zero for large portions of the episode. I think even some of the most basic interactions would have been at zero percent comprehensible if I did not have the subtitles in front of me. It was incredibly demoralizing.

 

What is going on here? How can I watch episodes of 降世神通 and feel very comfortable without subtitles, but then watch 百妖谱 and understand almost nothing, even with subtitles? 

 

Can someone give me any insight into this?

[Jan Finster]

It really depends on the speaker (familiarity with the accent, speed, etc) and the content. 

 

Ultimately it also boils down to exposure to a particular vocabulary. I can listen to native health podcasts fairly comfortably, but political podcasts are very challenging. 

 

(I am sure you know that, but the first video is really not "advanced level". The speaker also enunciates perfectly making it very easy) 

[黄有光]

Oh for sure, for sure. This video is much closer to my actual listening comprehension limits (exceeds my capability, but just by a little bit).

 

I just went back and rewatched one of the scenes in 百妖谱 that gave me a lot of difficulty, and now that I've had time to calm down and reevaluate, I notice that many of the sentences that were problematic are much less problematic if I'm pausing and reading the subtitles directly. So I think the main problem is my listening comprehension here---though my vocabulary is also lacking. 

 

I notice, for example, that 13 minutes into the first episode (I saw the link I posted doesn't work for some reason?), there is a scene with soldiers in a camp all dressed in grey, and they speak very quickly and casually. Their speech lacks the clarity of news broadcasts. Based on this, I imagine my best course of action is to continue listening to news broadcasts until my listening comprehension there has completely matured. After all, I don't think poorly enunciated casual speech is going to be achievable for me if clearly enunciated newscaster speech still poses some problems. Then, once I can reliably understand news broadcasts, I can move on to one of two paths--I can focus on improving my listening comprehension regarding materials which have greater lexical diversity (e.g. audiobooks), or I can focus on improving my ability to understand a variety of accents spoken at casual speed. When I can do both of those things comfortably (and after I have added maybe another 10-20k words to my vocabulary), I will probably be able to come back to 百妖谱 and watch it without difficulty.

 

Do have any recommendations for material that would be suitable for the second objective (a variety of accents spoken casually, and at full speed)? The absolute ideal would be speech-dense (i.e. consisting mostly or entirely of dialogue with only short pauses) and would have a transcript accessible to me. Maybe some kind of podcast?

 

[suMMit]

I have this all the time. Some people (video or real life) I understand easily, some I struggle with. I was sitting in the sauna last night and talking to two guys, the first one was from Fujian and the second one was from somewhere in the north. I had no problem at all with the second guy, partly because his accent was very standard, but also because I think he knew to grade his language a little in terms of speed and vocabulary. The first guy was full speed ahead, accent that I don't hear much and throwing in words or sayings that I don't know. I feel like Chinese use A LOT of sayings - and when they talk to a laowai, it's like they always want to "teach" you something, so they tell you these idioms or sayings.

 

Your first link, as Jan pointed out, is Advanced "LEARNER" , but not really advanced, I can also follow that very easily. The animated thing I watched a minute of, I could follow it ok/less easily, their voices are cartoon voices and that's something I rarely watch. Also probably very colloquial. The News clip I could follow and get the gist, but there are probably many new words to me if I watched the whole thing. As you probably know, in real life, NOBODY is talking like the people in ANY of those videos. 

 

For me, with a vocab of around 9k, I struggle most with people in real life who just go full speed ahead, and talk to me like I'm not a learner. So, I'm trying to watch stuff that helps me practice that. Currently, I'm watching this drama series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRvCYFlUQyE&list=PLkvG4EWPDB0mcU_bbFU3dZsAp7xALlGFM&index=25

 

Sometimes I  get everything no problem, other times I get 30%, there are times when I can catch almost nothing. But these people speak similarly to the people I encounter in real life, so I'm pad my study with this kind of thing at the moment. 

 

I think it boils down to what @Jan Finster said: familiarity with topic vocab, accent, speed, colloquial-ness, idioms/sayings, etc.

[Flickserve]

On 2/20/2025 at 10:30 AM, suMMit said:

The first guy was full speed ahead, accent that I don't hear much and throwing in words or sayings that I don't know. I feel like Chinese use A LOT of sayings -

Just recently, a Chinese person in mainland China played me a clip of Adele speaking in a street interview - incomprehensible to the Chinese person.

 

Fast speech, strong London accent, missed some words and she said “I look like my uncle at a wedding” implying her dress sense for a certain occasion wasn’t on par.

 

You need experience and sometimes local culture to understand. Just like trying to understand Gen Z.

 

If a place like UK can have so many accents over only a short distances, then China is going to have huge differences 

[lordsuso]

If that's your first animated show, it's normal to struggle. It's a bit of a pain, but you basically have to re-learn every single new register. The good thing is that the adaptation period seems to be getting shorter with time (for me). Btw this happens in my native language as well, I am Spanish but for instance if I am reading/watching some South-American content from a country I am not familiar with, I will struggle at first.

[lordsuso]

On 2/20/2025 at 3:30 AM, suMMit said:

Currently, I'm watching this drama series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRvCYFlUQyE&list=PLkvG4EWPDB0mcU_bbFU3dZsAp7xALlGFM&index=25

thank you for the recommendation I think I will watch it as well, I really like that actress

[Jan Finster]

Listening is for sure the most challenging aspect to language learning. I have been exposed to English as a second language since I was 6, but at times, when I watch movies, I still do not get every single word. This may be due to unclear speech, noise/music in the background, etc. Does not really happen in my native language. 

[Woodford]

This is basically the story of my life these days. I'm approaching 10 years of seriously studying Chinese, and I'm feeling my skills mature in really encouraging ways. I can watch a YouTube video where a Chinese speaker speaks at an extremely fast pace about geopolitics or philosophy or neuroscience, and I can understand it comfortably enough to enjoy it. But then there's another video where a person is talking about a day playing with his dog in the park (or some simple thing like that), and it requires so much more effort to understand, for some reason. I've observed, also, that female speakers are generally easier for me to understand than male ones. I'm really bad at understanding dialogue in dramas, cartoons, etc. I'm way better at academic speech, news broadcasts, and other more formal settings.

As a native English speaker, I also find it notoriously difficult (sometimes) to understand dialogue in English movies. There are actually a lot of online discussions about that, like this one: https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/

[Moshen]

I don't understand why 黄有光 thinks that spending more time on news broadcasts will enable him/her to better understand other kinds of speech.  Colloquial speech has very little in common with newscasts!  My husband has been in the US for 40 years and he still has to turn to me for explanations sometimes.  Most recently, a handyman looking at another handyman's work said the latter was "really sketchy."  You would never hear that word in a newscast!  My husband had not a clue what that meant.  Another time he showed me a written political editorial that made me just shake my head at trying to explain it, because it was full of sarcastic sentences that depended on the reader having read, let's say, The Odyssey, The Bible, The Lord of the Rings and more.  Again, newscasts are never that convoluted.

 

My take is that if you want to better understand colloquial speech, listen to more colloquial speech. Etc.

[黄有光]

@Moshen The reason is because one of my big problems lies not in understanding the words themselves, but in parsing speech. In other words, I may hear a sentence composed entirely of vocabulary that I in theory am very familiar with, but still hear the sentence only as garbled noise. I figured it would be best to work on curing this problem with carefully enunciated speech first, then move on to speech that is spoken e.g. in non-standard accents, or with sloppy pronunciation, etc.

 

But you're absolutely right that the vocabulary used in a news broadcast is going to differ pretty drastically from the vocabulary in, like, a wuxia audiobook.

[Flickserve]

On 2/20/2025 at 3:34 PM, Woodford said:

I've observed, also, that female speakers are generally easier for me to understand than male ones.

I have noticed this as well. 

[黄有光]

I tried to watch an episode of 父母愛情, but that, too, was too advanced for me in terms of listening comprehension. I already have difficulty parsing clearly pronounced speech---the casually, and VERY rapidly pronounced speech in the first ~10 minutes of the first episode is too much, especially with all the background noise.

 

Does anyone have any podcasts they could recommend me that would be help me expand my listening comprehension beyond clearly-enunciated newscaster speech? I think I desperately need practice listening to Chinese as it is spoken by everyday people. I am particularly interested in geopolitics, cooking, history, and science, if that helps.