More Listening Q's from a beginner...

[Strawberries513]

First I wanna say thanks to everyone here, my Chinese has improved so much thanks to all of you.

But anyway, I have realized lately that my listening skills are...terrible. I have a bunch of short mp3 dialogs to listen to but I have some questions about them.

-When listening, should I do my best to not have to look at the transcript after the first few listenings?

-Should I just listen to them over and over?

-If I do listen to them over and over, wont I simply memorize it unintentionally? Then It wont help anymore will it?

Thank you so much for any help! I hope my listening gets better...

[Steadi]

Knowing our problems is definitely the first step to fixing them. I would say not to look at the transcript before you listen to the dialogues, you want to improve your listening, not your reading. First just listen to get the general jist of what they are talking about, as much as you can, then the next times try to answer specific questions about the passage. Questions could be ones from the accompanying texts you are using, or ones a Chinese speaking friend has prepared for you. You also could use modified transcripts to do cloze activities with the passages. Only after you have exhausted these possibilities should you look at the complete transcript. After you have read the transcripts you can do activities like choral reading to improve your spoken rythm and stress, which will in turn improve your listening.

I also agree that after having memorised the passages they are of little use, you should always be on the lookout for new listening material. Hope this helps.

[wai ming]

I'd just like to say that I don't think unintentionally memorizing them is necessarily a bad thing. Memorization will help your responses become more automatic, so if someone says the same thing to you, you'll know what they mean without having to stop and think about it. This may actually help your listening comprehension (to an extent).

However, you can get a lot more benefit from doing more than just memorizing the dialogues eg you could blank out one speaker and fill in the gaps yourself, which might be helpful.

Personally, I think it's good to not look at the transcripts until you've listened to the dialogues a few times and worked out as much as you can for yourself. I'd just use the transcripts to double-check your understanding.

[kudra]

I don't think memorizing is such a bad thing. For beginners you are trying to train your vocal muscles to generate tones and consonants, and learn vocab and grammar all at the same time. What is the harm if you work at a passage to the point of memorizing it? I don't think the point should be to memorize it, but it is useful to have some vocab and grammar patterns automatically available. This is probably one of those things that are different for everyone.

And with the internet, there is alway more audio out there to practice on. I just don't see it being that big a deal.

I guess I would go over new vocab, then listen without the book to see how much I get. Then maybe listen while reading the transcript to resolve any ambiguities -- seeing the pinyin is a bit of a crutch, but if you are still training your ear, then I think it is efficient. Eventually you will not need the pinyin to help you hear the tone consonants and vowels, but I wouldn't sweat it at the beginning. You might want to quiz yourself now and then to make sure you are gradually becoming less dependent on the pinyin, rather than more dependent. I don't think it's a big deal though. But you also want to practie speaking, so somewhere in there you are going to have to go over it slowly and practice speaking the lines, going very slow to get all the tones right. I would do this all in pinyin transcript.

Then go back and listen without the transcript.

I think learning to read and write the characters should be separate from listening to the audio, at least at the beginning.

Just what works/worked for me. Recap,:I don't see the great harm in inadvertantly memorizing it.

[Steadi]

I also agree that inadvertantly memorizing text is not a "bad thing", just not particularly useful. I agree with Kudra memorizing grammar Forms[ is very useful and will help you out in a tough situation. The only caveat would be that you always try to expand and play with the new grammar forms. Otherwise you run the risk of sounding like a robot. Anyone who has taught English in China knows what this is like, ask 90% of students "How are you?" and you get a programmed "Fine, thank you and you?" back every time.

More importantly I totally agree with Kudra that reading/writing and speaking/listening should be almost completely seperated in the basic beginning levels; this is one of the philosophies of my school and there are many reasons for it. I actually am putting an article up on my site to discuss it further in the coming weeks but here are the main reasons.

1) Characters are not phonetic and so cannot help beginners with pronunciation.

2) Stroke order and formation rules, as well as "bu shou" are often neglected when taught alongside oral classes.

You cannot follow a progression from basic to complex characters when teaching them along side speaking, as characters will be introduced as they are spoken. The most frequently spoken words don't have to be the easiest to write.

3)In Oral classes the word is the basis of communication, while in writing/reading classes it is the character. For example in a spoken class we would first learn 火山 means volcano, while in the written class we would first learn 火 is fire and that 山 is mountain. In this way you learn how to use the basic building blocks of the language.

I could go on, but I really just wanted to give Kudra credit and say I supported his opinion . Too many programs try to shove it all together. It doesn't work.

[wrbt]

Notch another vote for the "listen a few times first" camp.

Try to get the gist at normal speed a few times, then play the rewind game to try to catch the parts said to fast or in too complex a manner, then finally use text to really finish digesting before reviewing.

I believe in addition to dialogues listening to pattern drills can help. Some good textbooks will have audios that go thru a common pattern over and over with different filler material to get you used to using pattern without thinking, like suddenly the "shi ... de" construction just rolling out without you thinking or planning it.