Is this efficient for listening comprehension?

[Qiaofei]

Hi~I've been learning Chinese for a year now and have recent a decent elementary going on intermediate level. I keep a journal so I can write in Chinese everyday, I often read it out loud and it has helped my speaking skills. But my worst skill is my listening and I plan to go to China in two years, and I'd rather try and get it as good as possible before I go. I'd say my two main problems with listening are:

 

1.) the actual comprehension. It really depends on the vocabulary, for instance I often hear from youtubers "欢迎来到我的视频台“， ”欢迎来到我的频道“ at the beginning of videos. I'm always able to comprehend it without even realizing it. But with other vocabulary/sentences sometimes I wouldn't even know that I knew all of the words until I looked at the subtitles. Is this normal for someone who's basically JUST started trying to actively listen to Chinese, and is it something that will just be 'fixed' over time with listening?

 

2.) The listening speed. I'm also going to assume this is something I'll have to overcome with practice but lack of vocabulary has never been my problem.Even when I try to tell myself to keep listening when I don't understand, as soon as they speed up it's like my ears refuse to listen. Just today I was watching two youtube videos in Chinese. This one from 0.33 to 1:39 I was actually able to understand a lot of it from the first listen since it was pretty basic vocabulary, I knew all of the vocabulary except 2 words. (类型，清洁 ) I was able to guess the pronunciation for the two words and look them up using pinyin and the characters from the subtitles.  I was able to do that with the other video for looking up the word museum. My concern is I feel like I wasn't fully comprehending every word even after repeating the same part over and over again to try and train my ear to the speed. Is this normal when listening in general not just for someone with poor listening skills, not comprehending every single word.

 

I've kind of 'mixed' up a method, I've seen used on here and wanted feedback on how it may help with my comprehension in the future.

-watch once without looking at the subtitles or pausing

-watch a 2nd time and pause and repeat over parts I couldn't understand or had trouble keeping up with the speed. (write down key vocab words if needed)

- repeat step 2 and take longer pauses and try to repeat sentences I couldn't understand or keep up with the speed.

-watch while reading subtitles

-watch once more without subtitles or pausing

 

I'm going to try this out to see where it gets me. I've been able to find a bunch of resources, tons of dramas on movies youtube, some speak faster than others. I also like the mandarin corner channel because her accent is different from what I usually hear, so that can help me adjust, slow Chinese for something more easier and to help with comprehension problem, Chinese youtubers, Chinese pod101 listening videos/pods and some Chinese podcasts I've found online.

[imron]

From a previous post of mine:

 

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As for specifics, this post provides specific steps for how to drill listening (it's what got me first started on drilling).  Make sure to read the follow up posts later in the thread by the same author.  I've also written up my own thoughts in a post here.  Note, those posts are years old now and the resources listed in them no longer exist.  See this thread on potential replacements for 锵锵三人行.

[Apollys]

On 9/15/2018 at 5:57 PM, Qiaofei said:

But with other vocabulary/sentences sometimes I wouldn't even know that I knew all of the words until I looked at the subtitles. Is this normal for someone who's basically JUST started trying to actively listen to Chinese, and is it something that will just be 'fixed' over time with listening?

 

Hey Qiaofei,

 

I think I can offer you some reassurances because I've been studying Chinese for around two years.  I've been through the struggles that are worrying you now, particularly the one I quoted above.  But in the past half year or so (during which I've focused more on listening comprehension), I've definitely noticed that I'm overcoming these problems.

 

When people ask me what the hardest part of learning Chinese is, my answer is always something related to the increcibly high homophone density in the language.  For example, how many characters can you think of that are pronounced the same as 是? Even though you've been learning the language for just a year, I would guess it's a lot.  So how does your brain figure out which character each sound refers to?

• Words.  Although in classical Chinese, characters generally stand alone and carry their own full meaning, modern Chinese is mostly composed of disyllabic words except for very basic words like pronouns.  As you familiarize yourself with more words (even if you're not learning new characters), the meaning of sentences will flow much more naturally into your brain.  Not only will you have a larger vocabulary to draw from, but you will develop a deeper understanding of how characters are combined and what sort of meaning they carry in various contexts.  So as your experience grows, you will notice that your brain develops a pretty strong ability to guess the meaning of new words composed of characters that you already know (and sometimes even new words composed of one character you know and one you do not).
• Patterns.  When you start learning a language, it feels like you're navigating an overwhelmingly high-dimensional space; as time goes on you start to see the patterns and realize that the space is instead very restricted.  This applies to all languages but is particularly relevant to homophone disambiguation in Chinese.  The first time you hear a particular pattern or combination of characters, your brain goes crazy searching through all the possibilities to figure out what these sounds actually mean.  But the next time you hear that pattern, you don't have to go through the full search again, there's a sort of "shortcut" link that's been formed in your mind.  Building these connections is what enables language comprehension to transition from an intensely arduous task to something that happens so naturally you can't turn it off even if you want to.  But there are a lot of connections to be built; this process takes a long time.

 

Overall, the observations you've made and the problems you're facing are a necessary part of learning the language, and you will see vast improvement in these areas even in the next 6-12 months.  In my opinion, here are the important things to keep in mind with respect to language comprehension:

• You have to know the words that were said in order to learn them.  I'm sure this isn't groundbreaking to you, but it's the precursor to the next point.
• Knowing a word means knowing its characters.  Make sure that in your mind you're associating characters with meaning + sound, rather than associating sound with meaning. (Of course, sound and meaning will start to develop connections over time, but your intent should be to think of a character as an object with a visual representation, an oral representation, and a meaning.)
• Understand the mapping between textbook standard pronunciation and the way the person actually speaks the line (e.g. in a TV show).  The way I do this is by first speaking the line as "textbook standard" as I can, then alternately playing the line and speaking the line myself, slowly transitioning from textbook standard pronunciation to the way it was spoken in this particular scenario.  This serves many purposes, such as learning where to place emphasis in sentences and understanding the phonetic shortcuts that your mouth and tongue take when speaking the language more quickly.  This can also be quite fun when you're watching a TV with characters who have funny or interesting accents!  Do your best to try to mimic their speaking styles and accents (unless they are intentionally/obviously speaking inaccurately, e.g. the Japanese guy from 爱情公寓).
• Speed is something that comes with time.  You can be 100% confident that issues of speed will take care of themselves if you study properly.  Why?  Primarily, you have to forge more connections in your mind so that language interpretation becomes easier.  One way in which you will see this effect is the aforementioned feeling of having to navigate a super-high dimensional space, and later realizing the possibilities are actually much more confined.  Another is familiarizing your mind with "real" language rather than "textbook" language - observing different people use the language in their own way for efficiency, expressiveness, or often some degree of sloppiness.  Expose yourself to the language and provide your brain the resources needed to make sense out of it, and speed will come.  Avoid excessively drilling single phrases to increase speed - if your brain isn't ready for the speed of something when you first encounter it, that's totally fine.  Give it a couple tries, then move on.  A few months later, you may be happily surprised when you come across something similiar and realize you can understand it without a second thought.

 

Edit: I noticed you mentioned guessing pronunciation and looking up words by their pinyin.  Instead, you can get the free app "Pleco" for your phone, and use it to write in any characters by hand.