Telephone conversations hard to understand—is it just me?

[Manuel]

I've been in China since late 2009 and, while I've not been the keenest of students (mostly learning through passive exposure), my Chinese is eons better than it was when I arrived in China, though still nowhere near as good as my English. Now I'm 9 years in and I still get caught out during telephone conversations. Why?

 

Here are some reasons I could think of:

 

• The audio quality is just plain bad. For example, try calling Microsoft China support.
• The other person talks fast (e.g. sales calls that want to tell you as much as possible before you hang up on them).
• The other person talks in an accent I'm not familiar with.
• The other person uses words or expressions I have not learnt.
• Lack of visual cues (lip reading, facial expressions, hand gestures, etc).
• The prospect that the conversation could derail at any time, which in turn increases the odds of derailment.
• Not knowing the topic or direction of the conversation beforehand.
• Cultural differences.

 

My first language is Spanish. I lived 10 years in the UK and the day I arrived my vocabulary was limited to little more than hello, goodbye, yes and no. Naturally, phone calls weren't my forte at the time, but two years later I was already sailing through telephone conversations. Maybe Chinese is just harder. Would love to hear your experiences, cheers!

[Flickserve]

Oh. I have this in Cantonese when all those telesales people ring me up or the bank rings me up with its latest offer.

 

finance is not my field so vocabulary is a problem and following what they are saying is a complete failure 

[Manuel]

Now I hate telesales calls, but many years ago I would consider them free Chinese lessons and I would just play along: "My Chinese is sh*t, but I'm interested. Do go on." Eventually it was the agent giving up on me. Now I usually hang up before they've finished their first sentence. Telesales agents don't have feelings anyway.

[889]

Certainly agree that phone calls are hard. For me, it's mainly the lack of visual cues and the unease you mentioned. Always glad when the conversation is over and I can relax.

 

(And if it's an important call, you need to quickly communicate to the other party that you're not a native speaker, so they can adjust their speech accordingly.)

[vellocet]

Voice calls are audio that's been compressed and clipped down to the bone.  They're hard for everyone to understand these days. 

[Flickserve]

3 hours ago, Manuel said:

Now I hate telesales calls, but many years ago I would consider them free Chinese lessons and I would just play along: "My Chinese is sh*t, but I'm interested. Do go on."

 

If you have time, it’s ok

[Manuel]

2 hours ago, Flickserve said:

If you have time, it’s ok

 

That's during my first year in China, had a scholarship to study the language for a year and finding ways to immerse myself in the language was pretty much my full-time occupation ?

[Manuel]

I'm sure this has happened to some of you: The other person is talking too fast and you ask them, politely, to slow down: "I'm sorry, I'm a foreigner, please can you speak slowly?". They speak slowly for like 5 seconds and then relapse back to full-speed mode.

[Lu]

Plus if someone calls you and you don't know what the call is going to be about, so you have to figure out what the other person is saying while also figuring out what general topic you need to listen for. I also still find this hard.

[Moshen]

Quote

The other person is talking too fast and you ask them, politely, to slow down: "I'm sorry, I'm a foreigner, please can you speak slowly?". They speak slowly for like 5 seconds and then relapse back to full-speed mode.

 

Don't feel badly.  This happens to me on the phone in English, and I am a native English speaker.

 

Have you had your hearing checked?  In my case, I have mild hearing loss that doesn't affect me in everyday life except on the telephone.

 

Just be very firm about saying again and again that they need to speak more slowly.  Some people will get it, others won't. 

 

The worst is where people are reeling off something they say a million times a day.  They don't enunciate clearly and have a hard time saying their automatic spiel more slowly because then they have to think about the words.

[Manuel]

26 minutes ago, Moshen said:

Have you had your hearing checked?

 

Not professionally, no, but I have a nice audio interface at home and nice Sennheiser headphones and I can hear a pure sine wave up to about 15 kHz, so not exactly golden ears, but not too bad either. I know hearing loss usually begins at the high frequencies (needed for effective speech intelligibility especially in noisy environments) and then progressively works its way down the frequency range as we age. I don't know if my current hearing is considered normal for my age (37). My mother's mother had very bad hearing and my mother has lost quite a lot in recent years—maybe it runs in the genes, if that's even possible.

 

I do have a problem which is that my attention gets drawn too easily to intermittent background sounds. So for example, the other day I was talking to a friend in the underground car park and suddenly this kiddo started screeching at his mother at random intervals, about 20 metres from us. Every time the screeching started I couldn't focus on anything else, no matter how hard I tried. I could hear my friend talking but couldn't process the words. In Chinese conversation, if a word I don't understand comes up, my mind will involuntarily get drawn entirely to the 'void' and completely ignore anything that comes after for a few seconds. It's very hard to control, because if I start mentally telling myself to ignore the void, then I'm already not focusing on the conversation! Maybe there's a technical name for this. I think I might be able to train myself out of this maybe by playing music, white noise and two conversations all at once, and then trying to follow one of the conversations, as an exercise.

 

Funny thing is, back home in Spain I have no trouble eavesdropping on conversations happening two shut doors away but, then again, it's my first language.

[Tomsima]

12 hours ago, Manuel said:

Now I hate telesales calls, but many years ago I would consider them free Chinese lessons and I would just play along: "My Chinese is sh*t, but I'm interested. Do go on." Eventually it was the agent giving up on me. Now I usually hang up before they've finished their first sentence. Telesales agents don't have feelings anyway.

 

Yes, ah I used to also love the 微商 people that would always be coming into our building and knocking on the doors. You can literally stand at the door chatting with them for a good half hour at least before they leave (because they totally bought that I don't have alipay, being a no money no tech 可憐 foreigner and all). Highly recommended.

[Flickserve]

To be fair, those people are also trying to earn a living so I personally wouldn’t want to waste too much of their time either.

[大块头]

Do Chinese speakers have a different set of names for the letters of the English alphabet? If the person on the other end is trying to spell out an email address to me I usually have a really hard time understanding them.

[Lu]

I don't even try email addresses on the phone. I ask them to text me, or if they need my email, I text it to them. These days I have a website and people already know my professional email. When I was living in Beijing, I worked for an organisation that had standardised email addresses: initial.surname@organisation.nl. My surname is both long (11 letters) and weird (a word of unknown origin and meaning). I am not going to attempt spelling it in Chinese to a Chinese person over the phone. Give me your number and I will text you.

[mungouk]

On 12/8/2018 at 1:44 AM, Tomsima said:

the 微商 people

 

Pleco and MDBG only give "(math.) derivative" as a definition for 微商.  

 

Presumably they're not going door to door demonstrating calculus, what's the meaning here?  

 

Are they people selling small things, or small amounts of things?

 

 

[Publius]

@mungoukMy understanding is 微商 = sell stuff using WeChat Moments/微信朋友圈. It might not be the official definition, but you can always go to Baidu to find out the meaning of unknown new words like this.

[imron]

23 hours ago, 大块头 said:

Do Chinese speakers have a different set of names for the letters of the English alphabet?

Yes.

[Yadang]

On 12/8/2018 at 7:02 AM, 大块头 said:

Do Chinese speakers have a different set of names for the letters of the English alphabet?

 

In Taiwan it's almost like they have a standardized way of mispronouncing certain English letters (stemming from pronouncing the letters with Mandarin pronunciation). For example:

 

C = "xi1"

F = "e-foo"