Questioned for experienced Chinese learners about listening comprehension

[litcandle]

Hello everyone,

 

Background:

My native language is English, but I've studied Chinese for a while and even passed HSK6. Experienced learners know that there is actually a big gap between HSK6 and professional level fluency, so I want to say I've studied a lot even after passing HSK6. I've read a couple books, spent entire days speaking Chinese, and even sat through 新闻联播 with a tutor for listening practice.

 

Question:

I recently went to a play that was entirely in Chinese. I could understand about 80% of what was said, so my comprehension was pretty bad. This made me wonder if it is actually possible for a non-native speaker to reach the listening comprehension necessary to understand all of what is said in unsubtitled movies, comedy shows, plays, song lyrics etc. Does anyone have any stories about this. I have a feeling that part of the reason might actually be that they make a lot of references that I don't understand, which might not be a problem of language but a cultural difference.

[Jim]

I pretty much do now, with the odd "come again", but by and large only at things that might similarly catch me out in English due to obscure subject matter in a costume drama or the like, though you do process that a touch slower when you're not as confident in identifying it as something weird rather than your listening comprehension where that would not be a problem in English.

I am often caught out chatting to my older neighbours here due to both accent and generational/lifestyle differences in the way they express themselves, but at something like a parent's meeting at the kids school I rarely have a problem.

[litcandle]

@JimHow long have you known Chinese for? Was there a moment when you realized you could understand everything or was it a gradual process? Part of my problem might be I haven't actually lived in China for that long. I attended intensive courses at home to learn Chinese.

[Jim]

I probably got to a decent conversational level almost twenty years ago (though my speaking is still fairly ropey considering) and have largely lived here ever since with a few gaps so really it would be embarrassing if I didn't! I think it's a sort of process of gradual accumulation with breakthroughs, plateau to plateau. I probably also had a few backward steps, for example when I stopped working in an office with Chinese colleagues to work mostly from home.

I'm possibly a bit hampered by not having much time or inclination for Chinese audio visual media in any great quantities though I have subtitled films too, so I know I can usually follow things if I want or have to. I work far more often with texts, so I mix everyday chitchat of family and village life with some fairly abstruse topics from art, history and literature that I only read. I do stick the radio on while I work sometimes but tend to prefer quiet.

[Flickserve]

On 10/30/2023 at 11:04 AM, litcandle said:

which might not be a problem of language but a cultural difference.

That’s pretty common anyway where you have people from different parts of the world meeting up. A common example would be the differences between British and American humour. 
 

Song lyrics can be pretty hard because they might be a form of poetry. Even songs in English can be pretty hard. 
 

Sometimes you have to absorb the experience. For example, if you are newly arrived in China, you would not understand their references to covid or pre covid times. 

[vellocet]

Sigh.  It's the posts like these that make me quail at ever getting good.  Some guy is way beyond HSK 6 and still isn't fluent. Why couldn't I have become fascinated with an Indo-European language country instead?

[abcdefg]

On 10/31/2023 at 8:55 PM, Flickserve said:

Song lyrics can be pretty hard because they might be a form of poetry. Even songs in English can be pretty hard. 

Jokes are my downfall. I usually manage to understand straight conversation pretty well, but am hopeless with Chinese humor. 

[matteo]

I read many posts similar to this one over the years and I wonder if it is sometimes a matter of unrealistic expectations. 

In my experience, few to no non-native speakers ever reach a level of fluency and mastery of a language that is truly comparable to natives. 

This is probably clearer to all non-native English speakers, who on average spend ten years studying English at school after which they can barely order a coffee.

 

 

[Moshen]

Quote

In my experience, few to no non-native speakers ever reach a level of fluency and mastery of a language that is truly comparable to natives. 

 

I don't agree with that.  I have personally met well over a dozen people fluent in a second and even third language.  Their accent may not be not exactly perfect and they may have some blank spots when it comes to cultural matters, but if they are living and working in that language, not merely studying it, they can definitely reach fluency and mastery.  Functionally, they are pretty much equal to natives.

 

 

[litcandle]

On 11/1/2023 at 3:27 PM, vellocet said:

Sigh.  It's the posts like these that make me quail at ever getting good.  Some guy is way beyond HSK 6 and still isn't fluent. Why couldn't I have become fascinated with an Indo-European language country instead?

Lol I'd be comfortable working in Chinese at this point, so I wouldn't say I'm not fluent. If you have the Anglo monolingual conception of fluency, which is that I should be indistinguishable from a native speaker, then maybe I'm not fluent. But this is impossible anyway, so defining fluent in this way is not helpful.

[Jim]

Had a relevant example this morning. Dropped daughter off at school and popped into the breakfast place in the village on the way home to buy myself some baozi. There was only one other customer as this was already getting past breakfast time, and by way of conversation he asked out of the blue, "天天接送？" which caught me a bit off guard and took a second to process, but then you get it given the situation and I was able to reply, saying it was often her mum does the early school run while I mostly fetch them in the afternoon.

[becky82]

I feel listening is the hardest to improve (see also Why is listening in Chinese so hard?).

 

Like with the other aspects, we likely need hundreds of hours of repetitive listening practice to lock everything down and make listening automatic.  But if we watch a movie, we may miss a key plot point in the third sentence and struggle to understand anything, or if we watch the news, we might not be able to keep up with the extreme speed (I tune out when they start listing assorted statistics).  If we use subtitles, we're effectively reading with extra steps (not listening), but if we don't use subtitles, we might not understand much at all.  And if you're like me, you might feel shows in Chinese tend to not be as good as those in English (with exceptions, of course... 妖猫传 is awesome!).  If we slow down the audio, it sounds unnatural, and it's kind of "cheating" (and I find it doesn't help that much).  If we listen to the radio, we likely tune out and train ourselves to think of it as background noise.  YouTube teachers (and teachers in general) tend to like teaching new vocabulary, rather then help you listen correctly to "学过的" vocabulary (i.e. consolidate).  If we don't hear what someone says correctly, they may stop talking to us, which is embarrassing and demoralizing.  I've encountered many Chinese people who (perhaps out of shyness) simply don't speak loudly enough for me to even hear, which in turn affirms their preconceived belief that I don't speak Chinese.  Very few people are willing to talk about the same topic, say, 10 times over.  It's hard finding people willing to talk about topics that interest me.  Honestly, it's really quite challenging to get useful listening practice.

 

Mentally converting audio input into comprehensible words and sentences is hard.  You don't just need to "know" a word, you need to recognize it within a fraction of a second, as part of a broader context, from (potentially misheard or imperfectly or non-standardly pronounced) pronunciation.  If you're anything like me, you've learned from crisp, standard, grammatical Mandarin, and it can be a struggle listening outside this bubble.  Moreover, for listening, words come from our interlocutor's active oral vocabulary (with different interlocutors having different vocabularies); they may not use the same words or grammar as you, and even as each other.

 

There's also a lot of syllables and words in Chinese that sound really similar to one another!  They could be identically pronounced (权利 vs. 权利), differ in tones (季度 vs. 嫉妒; 春节 vs. 纯洁), or involve a syllable that represents many characters (ji4 with 继承 记性 季度 迹象 寄托 忌讳), and so on.

 

Even native speakers are not getting 100% listening comprehension.  I recall a time I went to a restaurant with a Chinese friend of mine, and the waiter said something in Chinese (with an accent), and my friend turned to me and asked me what he said.  I get the feeling that sometimes, when Chinese people do not hear something correctly, they just pretend like they understand.

 

总而言之, listening is really hard to improve!  Understanding 80% of a drama is truly phenomenal.  I suggest comparing your current self vs. your past self: was this always possible?

[lordsuso]

On 11/1/2023 at 11:51 PM, Moshen said:

I have personally met well over a dozen people fluent in a second and even third language.

 

I am Spanish, and am fluent in French (moved here as a teenager 10+ years ago). I don't even have an accent, my name is the only giveaway that I'm not French. And yet, I can't understand certain actors without subtitles. Granted I might just be dumb, but I still think that it's very hard to improve past a certain close-to-perfect level if you are not a native.

 

Needless to say if I can't reach full 100% native-level comprehension in French as a Spaniard, I have no expectations of ever doing so in Chinese.