Getting out of a listening rut

[DavyJonesLocker]

On 3/3/2019 at 2:54 PM, mouse said:

It seems to me that you need to ditch the textbooks. If they're not helping, then the only benefit of using them (that they are simplified, petri-dish versions of the real language) is not present, and so only their downsides (that they are simplified, petri-dish versions of the real language) remain. If you're going to struggle through material, you may as well make it native material.

 

Well its not just textbooks, they are only part of it. In fact I made that comment on here many times before, in that the biggest mistake I made initially was sticking exclusively to textbooks, that was a mistake which I have rectified

 

 

16 hours ago, Wurstmann said:

I don't think that's true. You can understand your native language just fine, right? Most people just say they can't do maths or draw, but they don't even really try. If they would do it every day for an extended amount of time, they would get good. 

 

How much listening do you do every day? I think if you watch at least 2 hours of TV every day for a year, you will notice improvements. And be sure to turn off/block the subtitles, otherwise you just train your reading.

 

I know you were addressing Adam but I do have the same opinion. In reality, the difference in performance and progress between different people towards a discipline can be dramatic, multiple times faster. For example, I would talk to my friend almost every day for two years not she doesn't speak a lick of English. My spoken Chinese has improved but really no progress in a year. Its the same with a great many Asian speakers in London. They might have no improvement in 20 or more years despite speaking every day. My gf speaks Chinese to me only as do my friends, yet if i do not actively write a word down and put it in anki I will not remember it no matter how many times I hear it.  As regards listening to TV, I found that next to useless and frustrated me more. My listening can only be improved is by going through a text sentence by sentence, constantly pausing. Again every single language teacher I had would just play a text once on the CD without stopping. I and my classmates found it a total waste of time. There is a natural by product though, if go back to the earlier easier passages I can comprehend them with out stopping

 

 

 

 

23 hours ago, imron said:

How big is your deck, and how much time would you say you spend reviewing cards each day?  By comparison how much time would you spend doing long-form reading (either a graded reader, or a newspaper article or something similar)?

 

I ask because flashcards can give the illusion of learning and progress without actually giving you much learning or progress.  Depending on how strict you are in passing or failing cards, you might not even be learning anything to level required for practical use.

 

This is why I always recommend some other primary activity as the driver and measure of learning, with flashcards playing a secondary role.

 

Yes I agree well more in the sense that flash cards is a necesary too for me. I see it like eating a single type of vegatble , eat that only and you will suffer health consequencas, hoevere in balence its a good thing to do. I limit my flash cards to about 500 a day, theis is between an 1 - 1.5 hours. Now a prerequisite is that I must read. At the moment I read for 2 hours or more a day. Reading alone will not wrok. I tried and saw no progress  apart from new words that have already been on the simmer with ANKI.  I have time on my hands now soI can afoord to spend more time at chinese. If time is less , i.e. 2 hours a day I would bring total flash card reviews down to 200 or so mainly done on the subway etc 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There seems to attitude that anyone can do anything. Its based on admirable intentions and wishful thinking rather than the actual reality of the situation for some. Recently I saw a brain teaser on wechat which I solved in about 30 secs yet noone out of 60 or so people managed to do without a pile of incorrect guesses. Peoples brains are wired different

 

I have always found immense difficulty remember facts and logical thinking comes relatively easy for me. I can look at a word, take an easy one like a simple noun such as 猪肉 where there is not much scope for misunderstanding. I can fail to recognise the character 30 or 40 times over a couple of months in ANKI , despite seeing it every day in the supermarket. Yet I opened my PhD a few months ago. I wrote it 25 years ago and within an hour I could remember the theory by looking at the steps involved. The smartest guy I ever met, worked with my in banking. He has a PhD in physics from Cambridge University. I was light years behind him in terms of raw intelligence. His wife was from sichuan. We discussed Chinese learning. He tried it years and years and just simply couldn't do it despite the thousands of hours he poured into it  

 

Now its not all doom and gloom. I think rate of progress when used as a rolling average over the long runs is gradually upward trending. However I strongly believe that the rate of change does slow down until it tends towards a steady state. Many I will find this not to be the case in a few years 

The longer I live in China the more pepple I meet like Adam's and my case. As I mentioned my friend is a retired gent and been continually studying for 10 or more years now full time. He's around a HSK 4. I think what happens is that for some they try and try, only to find they have made no progress so just pack it in, strike it from the record to avoid embarressment. They won't be inclined to post on here nor try inspire others. 

 

Now despite all the doom and gloom i have spelled out above (its not all bad) I think the reason why i continue and what works for me is 

1. The satisifaction process is the key factor here not the end result. If you start resenting it, take a month off, try ignore the step back your have taken

2.  If it seems like  waste of time due to lack of progress, well I could be just playing computer games, watching tv, reading a book (still "wasting" time) etc

3.  Ignore the snake oil salesmen like Benny Lewis and the claims of "I passed HSK 6 in a year" Everyone loves a success story, no one wants to hear: I got 181 on HSK4 in 7 years and this is how did it" In anycase i think most of these stories are tall tales, vital information left out like a 2nd generation learner, been studing for years before hand etc. My teacher told me in 6 or 7 years she could count on one hand how many passed HSK5 in a year . Who knows what the real percentage is ?

4. Accept your lot in life, its not to say that you give up, nor even try, but there is no point flogging a dead horse. Make it enjoyable and if progress happens all the better. Its easy to let it consume your life.  

5. You can keep an eye on accepted advice on how to learn but end of the day "the proof is in the pudding", For example reading at the 98% level. I have read (twice) all the Chinese breeze, Chinese Grader readers  and Mandarin companion series, yet I did not absorb the missing 2-5% like the theory suggests. I am slowly getting through The Three  Body problem . Its way too advanced for my level yet its proving to be useful if read in digital format. at a wild guess I'd say 30% of words I don't know (if words are given a weighting by frequency of occurance, i.e acording to imron many words appear only once). Reading a book like this is against all the accepted advice yet its one of the most helpful things I have done in more than a year mainly because i am exposed to an interesting plot and being able to comprehend (with a tap of PLECO to check the word) longer and more complex sentences. 

6. Stubborness :）

7. Brute force

 

 

 

 

[Wurstmann]

11 minutes ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

As regards listening to TV, I found that next to useless and frustrated me more. My listening can only be improved is by going through a text sentence by sentence, constantly pausing.

Wow, in that regard we are completely different. Your method is way too boring for me. xD When I read or listen I'm doing it for the content, not the language. The advantage of TV shows is, that even if you don't understand anything you can still follow the plot. 

Lately I like to listen to her. She does a weekly show where she answers viewers questions. It's mostly about relationships and ordinary life.

 

I still think you can get good at listening. You already did it with one language... Maybe you could do Spanish or French for a year or two. When you get fluent in an 'easy' language, then maybe you will believe you can do it  with Chinese too.

[Flickserve]

1 hour ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

I can fail to recognise the character 30 or 40 times over a couple of months in ANKI ,

 

Hey. I have done this with Chinese songs that I put into anki.

 

1 hour ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

Yet I opened my PhD a few months ago. I wrote it 25 years ago and within an hour I could remember the theory by looking at the steps involved. The smartest guy I ever met, worked with my in banking. He has a PhD in physics from Cambridge University. I was light years behind him in terms of raw intelligence. His wife was from sichuan. We discussed Chinese learning. He tried it years and years and just simply couldn't do it despite the thousands of hours he poured into it  

 

This is going to sound a bit funny but the higher educated you are doesn't mean correspondingly better language learning ability. I found my Mandarin hampered by a wider active English vocabulary. In HK, there are two main groups of domestic helpers - Filipinos and Indonesian. The Indonesians are generally from poorer backgrounds and less education. However, I have been astounded at the fluent Cantonese level that some of these Indonesians have. I just wonder that their lack of literacy means they develop those aural and verbal (decent accent and control of tones) skills much better. 

 

As you say, (this will go against @Imron advice) I also don't do a bit everyday. For me it goes in spurts. I have breaks and long ones because I get pissed off and need time to get over it. Granted I am not taking exams - done the equivalent of three or four people's lifetimes of those.

 

[DavyJonesLocker]

1 hour ago, Wurstmann said:

Wow, in that regard we are completely different. Your method is way too boring for me. xD When I read or listen I'm doing it for the content, not the language. The advantage of TV shows is, that even if you don't understand anything you can still follow the plot. 

Lately I like to listen to her. She does a weekly show where she answers viewers questions. It's mostly about relationships and ordinary life.

 

I still think you can get good at listening. You already did it with one language... Maybe you could do Spanish or French for a year or two. When you get fluent in an 'easy' language, then maybe you will believe you can do it  with Chinese too.

 

 

haha I never said it was interesting! its hard work (+very tedious ) but mildy effective for me. I have tried and failed many times at following easy content at a native pace. Result is I get nowhere and quit. All my teachers had this awful habit of playing a CD full speed and it was 6 months of zero improvement, just frustration at the Chinese "do it my way" teaching style. In fact only when I and another student ,made a complaint to my language school and insisted they actually listen to the students feeback, did she begrudgingly go through it sentence by sentence , until, naturally there was no real need. Bingo instant improvement by myself and several students 

 

For me, I think there is definely progress to be made with listening . I have a lot of latent knowledge but the brain cannot decipher in real time. My problem is different than Adam's in that I can't just take in anymore words or characters. The glass is full so to speak. However I have the advantage of living in a native environment. . 

 

 

43 minutes ago, Flickserve said:

This is going to sound a bit funny but the higher educated you are doesn't mean correspondingly better language learning ability.

 

Oh indeed, wasn't trying to suggest it was. Its more to highlight the natural abilites of one individual over another. To this day in China I cannot remember my phone number, even after 4 years. I even did one of those memory test you see online, e.g.  you see 20 pictures , screen goes blank and after X mins you try recall how many you have seen. I was like ......test? what test? ?

 

48 minutes ago, Flickserve said:

As you say, (this will go against @Imron advice) I also don't do a bit everyday. For me it goes in spurts. I have breaks and long ones because I get pissed off and need time to get over it. Granted I am not taking exams - done the equivalent of three or four people's lifetimes of those.

 

i think this is where the emotional aspect comes in. I fully agree with most of what imron says however i too need downtime and away from the language, otherwise i will one day just pack in it and remove all evidence I tried. My best study day (and gym day) is Wednesday, for one main reason. I get a great big pizza, watch a tacky scifi movie, drink a load of beer, leave the rubbish on the floor and go to bed. Thus beforehand I put in a decent amount of effort with chinese learning (and wallop the gym).

[Wurstmann]

4 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

haha I never said it was interesting! its hard work (+very tedious ) but mildy effective for me.

So, do you do any listening just for fun? (e.g. for your movie night choose a Chinese movie,..) I think to get good you kinda have to live your live in Chinese. When you want to read a book, read a Chinese one, when you want to watch Youtube, watch something in Chinese and so on.

 

@AdamD @Flickserve @DavyJonesLocker

What astounds me the most is, there seem to be some people whose Chinese is far more advanced than mine, but they claim to have massive problems with listening (Flickserve comes to mind). Can you maybe post an example of someone speaking that you don't understand without subtitles, but would be able to if you read it? It could be that our definition of 'understanding' differs. Videos and conversations in general have lots of context most of the time. Doesn't that help you to understand, even if you don't hear/comprehend all the words?

 

As someone said:

Quote

The greatest problem I once faced in Mandarin was that my mind kind of....rejected the words. Chinese was an hour or so a day, not much more. Every word had to be painstakingly drilled in order for it to stay there, and often ended up being forgotten anyway. It was like the immune system of the mind would leap on the new, obviously-not-English word like a foreign bacteria and chew it to pieces before it ever had a chance to stay in my long-term memory. Why couldn't my mind simply accept a new Chinese word with the same ease it accepts new English words?

Because (of course) Chinese was an hour or so a day, not much more. As soon as conceivably possible, the mind must learn to treat the language as an old friend to be welcomed rather than a foreign intruder to be expunged. And the only way to make this happen is...wait for it....constant exposure to the target language.

 

[AdamD]

I'll post properly later, just want to reply to this:

 

2 hours ago, Wurstmann said:

Can you maybe post an example of someone speaking that you don't understand without subtitles, but would be able to if you read it?

 

Without trying to sound glib, you could take any given intermediate-level content and I wouldn't be able to understand it, even if I knew the characters, pronunciation and tones of every single word.

[Wurstmann]

So in this video you can't understand a single person or at least some words? And what about after reading the subtitles?

What does it feel like? Is it all a blur, or do you hear the words but they don't transform into meaning in your mind?

 

I don't want to 欺负 you. I really find this topic very interesting. ?

[Flickserve]

8 hours ago, Wurstmann said:

Can you maybe post an example of someone speaking that you don't understand without subtitles,

 

That would be the learning chinese series “Growing up with Chinese”. There’s a few instances where I just couldn’t make out the words, especially the one where the teacher was supposed to have said “turn to page ...”. Even with many repeated listenings, I couldn’t work it out. There was no way it followed the written word. 

 

BTW, got any street interviews on YouTube with northern accents? That’s the one I have most difficulty with. The interview you posted I can get about 60-70% with some guesswork. Southern accents are a bit easier for me. 

[DavyJonesLocker]

12 hours ago, Wurstmann said:

So, do you do any listening just for fun? (e.g. for your movie night choose a Chinese movie,..) I think to get good you kinda have to live your live in Chinese. When you want to read a book, read a Chinese one, when you want to watch Youtube, watch something in Chinese and so on.

 

well the problem with that is, any native material I just can't keep up with in real time. The delay in processing is too slow, Actually its the same with subtitles, even if its very simple, they are gone off the screen by the time I get half way through. 

 

Remember you have an advantage in that you (presumable) speak German , acquired excellent English and now on Chinese. Many native English speakers are not exposed much to languages apart from in school and often not by choice

 

 

 

9 hours ago, AdamD said:

Without trying to sound glib, you could take any given intermediate-level content and I wouldn't be able to understand it, even if I knew the characters, pronunciation and tones of every single word.

 

Pretty much me too, I can read HSK5 material easily enough. i have gone through the books and can get to a 90%+ comprehension level without needing to check the words. I don't really have much issues reading a middle of the road airport style novel (if I check unknown words) but i can recognise most of the grammer structures, i.e. I can figure out pretty much straightway the meaning to a 90% comprehension level. However the key difference here is that with reading, i can slow the pace down but with listening, its real time. The HSK5 listening i really struggle with it and once I read the transcript its simple to understand. 

 

I think in my case more exposure, listening sentence by sentence helps. I do it on PC and VLC where its easy to rewind, slow down jump back 10secs etc with a few short cuts. Maybe it will help you too.  Its dull as a dish cloth no question but in absence of any other method I am stuck as to what to do. Also, trying to get yourmindset right is no easy task. Its verty easy to get into a tizzy and frustrated that they sad something very simple and you still didn't get it 

 

...................

 

Mind you I need subtitles for English movies now as everyone keeps mumbling and sound effects drown out the speech. God I must be getting old! ?

[AdamD]

11 hours ago, Wurstmann said:

So in this video you can't understand a single person or at least some words?

 

The odd word but I can’t derive any meaning from it.

 

11 hours ago, Wurstmann said:

And what about after reading the subtitles?

 

It’s easier because I know what they said, but only if I can remember that subtitle. I can’t remember all the subtitles I read when I watch it again.

 

This is one of the many things I’ve tried, by the way.

 

11 hours ago, Wurstmann said:

Is it all a blur, or do you hear the words but they don't transform into meaning in your mind?

 

Both, because the random words I’m picking up are not enough for me to derive meaning. This is how it always is.

[AdamD]

3 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

Pretty much me too, I can read HSK5 material easily enough. i have gone through the books and can get to a 90%+ comprehension level without needing to check the words. I don't really have much issues reading a middle of the road airport style novel (if I check unknown words) but i can recognise most of the grammer structures, i.e. I can figure out pretty much straightway the meaning to a 90% comprehension level. However the key difference here is that with reading, i can slow the pace down but with listening, its real time. The HSK5 listening i really struggle with it and once I read the transcript its simple to understand. 

 

You and I are about the same. I failed HSK4 not because I didn’t know all the words (I did), not because I didn’t know all the tones (I did), not because I couldn’t read or write the vocab (I could), but because I was so distressed at being utterly useless in the listening section that I gave up and stopped mid-test. I was furious that day because I should have blitzed it. Right now I’m probably at HSK5 level, but there’s no way in hell I could pass the listening part.

 

[AdamD]

22 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

As regards listening to TV, I found that next to useless and frustrated me more.

 

Yeah, this is perfect. So many people sold me on watching TV as a silver bullet. It was not. At best I thought I could understand some 10 minute YouTube videos, but it turns out I had most of them completely wrong, and the rest were learners who were fumbling through slowly with a limited vocabulary.

 

Ongoing viewing did nothing at all, it just left me increasingly angry and upset.

 

 

[Wurstmann]

8 hours ago, Flickserve said:

BTW, got any street interviews on YouTube with northern accents?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-phPkdGX_k

https://www.bilibili.com/video/av45430559

 

I also have problems with northern accents, they tend to swallow half of the words. But some southerners also do that.

She talks quite fast, but very clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta_C_-j_oS0

He is not as clear: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av45153906

 

1 hour ago, AdamD said:

Ongoing viewing did nothing at all, it just left me increasingly angry and upset.

How long did you try for?

 

After a long time not really studying/progressing, I finally started again about 2 months ago. I'm watching TV/Youtube/bilibili for at least 2 hours every day. Sometimes I understand 0%, sometimes 98%, depending on the speaker, the topic, etc. The other thing I do is sentence cards in Anki. I believe if I keep that up, eventually I will get good. ^^ My biggest problem was always that I liked Japanese more. So I kept switching between these languages and made not much progress in both of them. Now I somehow like Chinese more.

[AdamD]

5 minutes ago, Wurstmann said:

How long did you try for?

 

Several years.

[Flickserve]

1 hour ago, AdamD said:

Yeah, this is perfect. So many people sold me on watching TV as a silver bullet. It was not. At best I thought I could understand some 10 minute YouTube videos, but it turns out I had most of them completely wrong, and the rest were learners who were fumbling through slowly with a limited vocabulary.

 

I have a theory that girls are much better at this than boys in general. I don't know if it is because girls can sit longer through periods of inactivity and naturally like to follow conversations. My kid has been watching Korean drama for the last three years and her Korean taekwondo instructors now solely talk to her in Korean.

 

I am borrowing a lot of Cantonese to help my listening skills which I find much harder if listening to northern accents. I can't sit through videos very well.

[Wurstmann]

1 hour ago, AdamD said:

Several years.

How many hours per day? I think years are not a good measurement.

 

When I passed HSK5 I could understand almost nothing on TV. I just crammed the vocab list. Since then I haven't 'studied' (textbooks, grammar,..) at all, just listened and watched and sometimes did some sentence cards, and as a result I can understand a lot more now. I realized I can't expect to be good at Chinese without first listening to a few thousand hours of content and reading a lot of stuff. I always knew this was true but I didn't really do it before. It was a lot easier with English. Movies, books, Youtube from the US or the UK are immensely popular in Germany and are readily available. We are forced to learn it at school for 10 years or so. A lot of words are really similar or the same. Still it took a lot of time until I could effortlessly understand almost everything. So with a language like Chinese, which has a completely different writing system and vocabulary and everyone has a (sometimes quite strong) different accent or dialect. Why did I expect to get somewhere by half assing it for years? So now I'm doing the same as I did when learning English. Let's see what my level looks like 2000 hours down the line. xD

 

3 hours ago, AdamD said:

I was furious that day because I should have blitzed it. Right now I’m probably at HSK5 level, but there’s no way in hell I could pass the listening part. 

I just listened to the sample here and yeah, it's harder than a lot of real life conversations. The audio quality isn't the best and there is no context.

[AdamD]

I’ve already said repeatedly that watching a hell of a lot of TV hasn’t worked.

 

On 3/4/2019 at 9:44 AM, AdamD said:

(edit)

 

And just to get the jump on what might happen next, because historically it usually has: while step 1 of my eternal hell is people kindly suggesting techniques that have not worked for me, step 2 is people expecting me to explain or justify my failure to make those techniques work. If that happens here now I’ll straight up abandon the thread for a while.

 

I revived the thread specifically to point out the effect this cycle has on me, and to stress that I don’t want to keep going through it.

 

[realmayo]

I wonder if you saw this thread from a couple of years ago where I was grumpy about not being able to understand some audio from a year 2 textbook:

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/52591-how-difficult-do-you-rate-this-snippet-of-audio/

I don't recall your exact study or testing methods for listening as detailed earlier in this topic. But jumping in cold to an isolated sentence in an anki deck or in an mp3 or in a social situation with strangers and awkwardness -- it's perhaps a bit like jumping into freezing water, the brain panics and shuts down for a few seconds, and once it's up and running again the moment has passed, the sentence or question or audio snippet is forgotten.

 

Apologies if this has been suggested already or you've done it before or whatever but: I wonder if you might benefit from some moderately long dialogues with audio and all the vocabulary and grammar explanations in one place -- best thing would be a 口语 textbook with mp3s. Not too difficult: you'd want to be able to already know most of the vocab and grammar. Go through it sentence by sentence with text and audio, slowly, not trying to test yourself or benchmark any improvement, instead just make sure you know the text inside out. Then listen to it while reading along to the text and your notes; then just with the text; finally just listening, no reading. It takes however long it takes, after a week or several you've nailed a dialogue of relatively natural speech at an appropriate difficulty level and you can relisten regularly to reinforce the connections between words, sentences, and so on. Then move onto the next one. Textbooks are best.

 

Of course it's possible that only a handful of people are good enough - or have enough (lots of) time and motivation - to get good at listening to a difficult foreign language without spending lots of time in an environment where that language is spoken.

[DanielG]

15 hours ago, AdamD said:

And just to get the jump on what might happen next, because historically it usually has: while step 1 of my eternal hell is people kindly suggesting techniques that have not worked for me, step 2 is people expecting me to explain or justify my failure to make those techniques work. If that happens here now I’ll straight up abandon the thread for a while.

 

I revived the thread specifically to point out the effect this cycle has on me, and to stress that I don’t want to keep going through it.

Hi Adam,  I just want to thank you for raising the topic in the first place, and eliciting so many suggestions. You might be an extreme case, but there are a lot of others who are in the same boat floating around in that vast ocean of spoken Chinese, understanding much less that we would like to. I also find this frustrating, particularly as I've gotten much farther in other languages after putting in a fraction of the time and work.  For me listening to and understanding spoken Chinese has always been the most difficult aspect of the language, and I have spent a majority of my language learning energy practicing listening and trying different techniques to get better at it, so I want to say that I for one do appreciate the flood of ideas and resources that have been shared in this thread.   I also want to remind you that you are not alone.  I consider myself good at languages and am rather dumbfounded at how bad I am at understanding what someone is saying in Chinese.  My personal feeling is that Chinese listening is difficult for two reasons:  One is the foreignness of Chinese - the sounds, the roots, the structures etc., are all quite different from my native language.  The other is my psychological response to the foreignness at an unconscious level.  It's too hard, and I'll never understand what people are saying.  The first won't change.  At best, through learning I'll get used to it.  The second however might.  I hope it does, and if it is getting in your way, I hope it does for you too. 

[Balthazar]

Regarding the whole "I'm horrible at listening" stuff that seems to affect so many learners of foreign languages that have no problems listening to their mother tongue, here's my two cents on the matter:

 

Assuming you have spent exactly the same time practicing listening as you have reading (with the same level of concentration, i.e. an hour's worth of reading != an hour's worth of listening to Chinese audio in the background while doing something else). If the audio you listen to is at about 160 words per minute (just an arbitrary number I picked) then you should be able to understand about as much as you would if you scanned the same text at 160 words per minute.

 

Not talking about anyone here specifically, but I know that I myself have a tendency to compare reading at a comfortable pace with listening to similarly difficult material that is spoken with a much higher WPM. So for a text that I can comfortably read at my cozy snail's pace, I will understand almost nothing of the audio version. (Additionally, my listening skills are well below my reading skills because (1) I spend more time reading and (2) I do most of my listening with a limited attention, while doing something else)