People studying foreign languages usually try one of these strategies:
1. Lookup and try to memorize every word.
2. Don’t look up anything. Even when you need to.
3. Superficial reading: Don’t lookup anything.
4. Look up frequently occurring words, e.g. the “three times rule”.

The first two strategies are inefficient. Don’t waste time looking up every single word. I’m not saying you can’t read for pleasure: if you aren’t studying, e.g. trying to improve your comprehension, and expand your vocabulary, then you don’t need to take notes. If you’re reading for pleasure, you don’t have to look words up. But if you are studying, not looking things up isn’t an efficient strategy.

Superficial Reading

Superficial reading is where you go through your reading material quickly, looking for the main ideas and concepts. Don’t get bogged down on words, sentences or paragraphs you don’t understand, and instead just try to get the gist of what you’re reading. It may sound counterintuitive, but oftentimes, you will get greater understanding from a superficial reading than one where you are constantly looking up words in a dictionary. It’s also useful to do a superficial reading before going back and carefully studying a piece.

The Three Times Rule

This rule is simple and pretty useful: Only lookup high-frequency words–words that appear three times or more. I learned this rule from my 报刊 (bàokān: newspaper reading) teacher and put it to good effect when I first started reading newspapers. I also saw this rule mentioned by Jake over on Skritter’s blog, too. Apparently this rule is popular with Chinese teachers in China.

Only Lookup the important words

Looking up words in a dictionary can take up a lot of time. It also takes you out of your reading flow. When you need to lookup a word, make sure you’re using a good dictionary (hopefully an electronic one or an online Chinese-English dictionary). And try to make sure the words you’re looking up are worth studying. If you’re reading a classic work by 老舍 (Lao She), you should probably spend less time with your dictionary.

Actions to take

1. Check your Chinese reading speed.
2. Get a tool to help you read Chinese.
3. Read something superficially before you try and master it.

What I did last week

1. Study my flashcards 4x
   Update: I wasn’t expecting I’d be able to do this one, but I got it done, studying Tuesday – Saturday.
2. Read at least 5 articles on Caixin.
   Update: Even I can get bored of Caixin. I only read 3 articles from Caixin (but I did read a couple of other peices, including a pretty long 财经 peice.
3. Start using Weibo.
   Update: I didn’t do this, but I’ll double down on it for this week.
4. Continue looking for audio sources that I can use to practice listening.
   Update: This continues to be a thorn in my spine. The podcasts I have found are monologues with sappy background music. Not what I’m looking for at all. I might have to change my strategy and look for something else.

The Plan for next week

I’m expecting a busy week, so I’m going to make sure my goals are achievable:

1. flashcards 3x this week.
2. get all my reading material from 微博

Summary

Make sure your reading techniques fit your reading goals. If you’re trying to build more vocabulary, spend more time studying words that you encounter frequently. Always try to do a mix of superficial reading and close study.

How do you practice reading? Tell me the tools or methods you like to use in the comments

Leave a comment.

]]> http://lingomi.com/blog/2012/02/get-better-chinese-with-reading-strategies/feed/ 0 http://lingomi.com/blog/2012/02/making-chinese-learning-easier-one-hack-at-a-time-with-dave-of-chinese-hacks/ http://lingomi.com/blog/2012/02/making-chinese-learning-easier-one-hack-at-a-time-with-dave-of-chinese-hacks/#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:34:07 +0000 Steven Daniels http://lingomi.com/blog/?p=1659 The same week I started this blog, I noticed another new blog: Chinese Hacks. Dave of Chinese Hacks is one of the best language bloggers, period. He blogs consistently; his posts are useful, and he covers a variety of different topics. No matter what level you’re at or what aspect of Chinese you’re in to, Chinese Hacks probably has a post about it. I look forward to reading Chinese Hacks as it gets into it’s third year and beyond.

About Dave

Blog: Chinese Hacks
Also Known For: The Mandarin Poster
Writes About:

• Study Hacks
• Chinese Lessons
• Chinese Tools and Resources
• Taiwanese Slang
• Idioms
• Chinese Vocabulary

What do you see as the most difficult problem that Chinese learners face?

This really differs from person to person, so it’s difficult for me to speak for everyone, and the problems you are faced with change at each stage as your Mandarin improves. For instance, when you first start out, basic pronunciation and stroke order might be the main issues you face, then for intermediate to advanced learners tone refinement and efficient vocabulary acquisition become more important.

A problem that I came across during my studies, and was one of the reasons behind my starting ChineseHacks, was that I found that the Mandarin I was learning in my textbooks was not the same as the Mandarin that native speakers were actually using. I really recommend using material that have been created with native speakers in mind, rather than restricting yourself to textbooks. The Internet makes it really easy to read content in Mandarin, and with the variety of language plugins that are available such as PeraPera or New Tong Wen Tang you can view definitions without leaving the page you are viewing.

Another thing that I am sure affects all learners, is the lack of available Mandarin content. I don’t just mean content that is targeted toward learners of Mandarin as a foreign language, but Mandarin language content on the whole. In languages such as English there’s a huge variety of content available such as television programming, movies, audio books and even podcasts for every obscure or niche topic. In Mandarin the selection seems more restricted and from time to time this can be disheartening. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for this and can only advise searching online on a regular basis for new content.

Quick Questions

Mandarin vs. Dialects
While I prefer Mandarin (obviously because I’ve spent so long learning it) I also like the idea of learning some of the local dialect. For instance, where I live in Taiwan, Taiwanese is widely spoken, sometimes it seems more than Mandarin. So it can really pay to learn some of local dialect that is used where you are living in the Chinese speaking world.


While not a dialect, accent is another factor of language learning that can differ by region. People often comment that my accent is very Taiwanese, which I don’t mind as I actually prefer the Taiwanese accent – I find the Beijing accent, which most people seem to be aiming for, to be very aggressive sounding and full of 兒音.


Traditional or Simplified:
Being in Taiwan, I obviously learnt Traditional characters, so my point of view might be a bit biased. It’s not that I’m against simplification, well, maybe I am. Chinese characters, by their very nature, are complex and represent ideas through their structure. After simplification a lot of characters seem to lose their meaning – a good example being the simplified version of 愛 (love) omitting 心 (heart) – how can you love without a heart? Other areas of simplification also seem illogical such as certain radicals not being simplified, but when used in other characters actually taking a simplified form, e.g. 言 in 谈, and 金 in 钱.

Pinyin or Characters:
Phonetic alphabets are another area, in addition to learning Traditional characters, were being in Taiwan can influence how you learn Chinese. I learnt the Zhuyin phonetic alphabet, which is the phonetic alphabet that is used to teach Mandarin to children in Taiwan. It has its own symbols to represent the sounds of Mandarin, and doesn’t use the Roman alphabet as with Pinyin. This makes answering the question of “Pinyin or Characters” a strange one, since unlike Pinyin, when you use Zhuyin to learn Mandarin you never see the phonetic alphabet on it’s own. From what I understand when using Pinyin to learn Chinese there is a very long period of time in which you only read Pinyin, and you are only introduced to the actual characters after this period. Whereas with Zhuyin, you are exposed to Chinese characters from the very start. This is one of the reasons that I argue against learning Pinyin in favour of Zhuyin, which is quite a controversial topic among learners. I wrote a post about the topic here.


Speaking/Listening or Writing/Reading:
Speaking and listening, and while I do try and keep a good balance, since I stopped taking Mandarin classes I haven’t really done much writing. I would imagine when learning Mandarin in your own country that focusing on speaking and listening is more difficult than reading and writing, so I would advise finding a language exchange partner and meeting on a regular basis. Also, written and spoken language often differ greatly, so if you want your Mandarin to be well rounded you really need to focus on both.

Do social websites (Twitter/Facebook/Weibo) have the ability to change the way people learn Chinese? How so?

Definitely. With Twitter/Weibo/Plurk you can easily follow people who are tweeting in Mandarin and get a real insight into how it’s actually used by native speakers. It’s also a great way to get in touch with other learners, which can be particularly helpful if you are learning by yourself. When I first started ChineseHacks the social networks were invaluable for finding new language learning resources and sharing content. Without the support of the online community I may never have had the ability to maintain the site and develop it for so long, so I owe a big thanks to everyone for that.

The Internet also provides a veil of anonymity that you can use to your advantage while learning a language – you could join a forum aimed at native speakers and never reveal that you aren’t a native speaker, this way the people you talk to won’t alter the way the way they speak, which people often do when talking to non-native speakers.

You create a lot of mini-lessons on a diverse range of topics, do you see these types of lessons as replacing the boring old textbooks that I studied from?

Yes, the idea behind ChineseHacks was always to provide an escape from the boring textbooks that I found myself learning from during my Chinese classes. When I first started ChineseHacks it was all about tips for how to more effectively learn Chinese while outside the classroom, though the site has gradually evolved into providing everything from mini-lessons to posts on idioms, vocabulary and which online tools you can use to help with your studies. We always try to provide a humorous or pop culture reference to help people remember the vocabulary or idiom, which is something you really won’t get in most Chinese classes.

What posts from Chinese Hacks are you most proud of?

There are some great posts that we have done that have become lost on the site. I’m in the process of redesigning the site so important content can be resurfaced and easy to find, but in the meantime some of posts that I like the most are:

Essential verb groups for basic Chinese – This is a great post for beginners and covers some really essential vocabulary and basic usage.

5 Essential Frequency Adverbs is another post that covers some really essential vocabulary and usage.

I also really like covering some of the Taiwanese slang that I encounter, such as 夯 (link) and 機車 (link), some of which have very interesting origins.

Then, of course, I love all of the posts in the idioms section where we really try to have fun with pop culture and Internet memes.

Do you have any Chinese-related projects besides Chinese Hacks?

I started a project called Mandarin Poster with a friend in Taiwan, Chris, who is actually responsible for a lot of the posts in the idioms section on ChineseHacks. Mandarin Poster covers the 1500 most frequently used Chinese characters and their Pinyin pronunciation. The project has turned out really well and we’ve been happy to be able to provide a useful learning tool.

We’ve also used the Mandarin Poster website to give back to the Mandarin learning community by providing free study resources such as the Chinese Radicals database, printable radicals poster and also printable practice paper. We’ve got some great feedback about this section of the site and hope to keep adding to the list of available resources.

Use Lingomi’s Chinese blog list to keep track of Chinese Hacks, and plenty of other Chinese-related blogs.

Ask Dave of Chinese Hacks a question!

]]> http://lingomi.com/blog/2012/02/making-chinese-learning-easier-one-hack-at-a-time-with-dave-of-chinese-hacks/feed/ 0 http://lingomi.com/blog/2012/01/learning-to-read-chinese-faster-week-4-of-52-weeks-of-chinese/ http://lingomi.com/blog/2012/01/learning-to-read-chinese-faster-week-4-of-52-weeks-of-chinese/#comments Sun, 29 Jan 2012 02:17:26 +0000 Steven Daniels http://lingomi.com/blog/?p=1652 Week 4 of 52 Weeks of Chinese

The first step to reading Chinese faster is to calculate your reading speed. How? It’s pretty simple. Time yourself while reading a few documents. Count the characters. Calculate your words/minute.

If you want to improve your reading speed, calculate your reading speed first. Then try to do more reading. As you get more comfortable, your reading speed will increase (even without using speed-reading techniques). Then 1-2 months later, re-calculate your reading speed. Once you’ve done that, you can start planning on how to increase your reading speed.

Why does it take so long to read Chinese?

One of the most common complaints I hear from people who are learning to read Chinese is that they read extremely slowly. Reading Chinese is slow for a variety of reasons:

1. Too many unknown words
2. Unfamiliar grammatical patterns
3. Inefficient reading methods

Which of these problems are affecting you? What’s making you a slow Chinese reader? Let me know in the comments. I’ll go into ways to improve your reading speed in the coming weeks.

Actions you can take

1. Calculate your reading speed.
2. 1-2 months later, re-calculate your reading speed

What I did last week

Last week was an odd week that included the Chinese New Year, my birthday and me getting sick (twice!). But despite, or maybe because of the oddness, I did a good job. I think I made up for my failure to be the perfect language student last week.

1. Flashcards.
   UPDATE: I did 3 flash card sets last week. It’s been a long time since I actively tried to acquire new vocabulary, so it feels weird, but good.
2. Watch more TV.
   Update: I did watch more TV. In my opinion, watching TV is one of the best ways to learn a language. It’s fun, and it gives you exposure to the language. Sara has a great goal for Chinese listening that includes watching TV. BTW, did anyone not see Wang Fei’s awful performanceduring the CCTV Chinese New Year gala?
3. Read more articles on Caixin.
   Update: I kind of forgot about this one. I did end up only reading news from Caixin (and other Chinese sources), but I did it by accident. Because of the holiday, I spent less time reading English news sources. Instead I watched TV, played cards (够级), and went places. Not sure if I deserve credit on this one.

The Plan for next week

• Study my flashcards on 4 separate days next week.
• Read at least 5 articles on Caixin.
• Start using Weibo.
• Continue looking for audio sources that I can use to practice listening.

Summary

Figuring out your reading level and speed is the first step to better reading skills.

I’m looking for people who are interested in learning to read Chinese or
just want to improve their reading skills. Contact me if you’re interested.

Leave a comment

Sometimes I fear that my writings and suggestions make me seem like a super man, or seem like I do everything right. Other language blogs I read are often written by extremely motivated and accomplished Chinese learners. Sometimes, that can be an inspiration, but other times it might be a bit discouraging, too.

But don’t despair. I’m not a perfect language student, or a perfect person. This past week is a good example.

Last week wasn’t a successful week. Getting sick took away a few days, leaving me busier than usual. I also planned to do too much, a recipe for possible failure. I’m often overly-optimistic when it comes to planning, and so this week, I’m eating a bit of crow.

I didn’t plan to get sick at the beginning of the week, but that’s happened. When I have the flu, my mind doesn’t work. I just lay in bed, drink fluids and rest. My recovery found me busily working on my website for learning to study hanzi and read Chinese. It should be finished in a week or so.

I only studied once this week. But this week is over now. I won’t carry my regrets to next week. One bad week happens once in a while. The key is to prevent one bad week from becoming two and then three bad weeks in succession.

How to prevent bad weeks from happening

AJATT has good advice on this: create your environment and plan your environment for learning your language. To avoid the temptation of watching US TV or reading too much news, I’m going to remove the English related apps reading and video apps from my iPad. That will leave me with the Chinese apps and lots of good Chinese content.

Realistically, next week will be tough. Being Chinese New Year (aka. Spring Festival or 春季 Chūnjié), I don’t know how much free time I’ll have to study. So, I’ll do most of my studying in the morning after waking up.

After waking up, the first thing I’ll do is crack open my iPad and do some reading. If you’re a morning person I suggest you try the same. If you’re an evening person make studying Chinese the last
thing you do before you go to bed at night.

Actions you can take:

1. Create your environment: remove the things that prevent you from studying Chinese from your life and add the things that help you study it.
2. Study first thing in the morning or right before bed.
3. Study things that are fun.
4. Only try to focus on one or two things at a time.

What I did last week

1. Read 3 articles on 财信
2. I failed to add any words to my flashcard sets. I’ll try again to do so this week.
3. Look for a language partner: another failure. Unfortunately, this will have to wait till after the holiday.
4. Watch the news. Simple, yet I didn’t do it. Part of the problem here might be I find the news more boring than watching paint dry.
5. Watch a movie/video with my wife: We watched an old Stephen Chow 贺岁片儿(hèsuì piànr: a movie released around the Lunar new year) called 家有囍事 (jiā yǒu xǐshì: All’s Well, Ends Well). It was funny and wacky in the way HK movies used to be in the 90′s. Like most HK movies in China, it was dubbed in Mandarin. Stephen Chow apparently always uses the same Mandarin voice actor for all of his movies.

If you’re keeping score, that’s 2/5 this week.

The plan for next week

1. Flashcards. I’ve just about finished the beta SRS Flashcard functionality for 3000 Hanzi, so I’ll begin using it to study. It ties seamlessly into the articles that I’m reading, which makes it much more convenient than other options.
2. Watch more TV: since next week is the Chinese New Year, this should be an easy task to do.
3. Read more articles on caixin. Next week, I’ll make Caixin my only source for news. The goal is to read some everyday.

Summary

Don’t get discouraged if you have a bad week. Make the next week better by changing your environment so that it works for you.

How do you bounce back from a bad week of study? Tell me in the comments section below.

Leave a comment.

You’re Chinese seems pretty good. How long did that take? What unexpected hurdles did you have to overcome?

My Chinese isn’t that great! I feel like I’m finally starting to reach the stage where it’s actually a useful, functional language for me.

I’m in my third year of full-time study. I started from scratch at university, but my degree is Chinese Studies, so pretty much the whole thing is focused on learning Chinese. I’d say the biggest hurdle compared to European languages is that a lot of words just don’t have an exact match between Chinese and English. Learning in context is more important than ever with Chinese.

What advice would you give to a Chinese newbie?

Do loads of listening. Aim to listen 24/7. You won’t be able to, but the more you aim to do, the more you’ll cram in. I really think listening is the most important part of language learning. Also don’t add too much stuff to your SRS, it’s easy for it to get overwhelming.

What’s the one post on your blog that everyone learning Chinese should read? Why?

That is hard! I always try to write stuff that I remember searching for or would’ve found useful earlier in my studies, so it’s usually little bits and pieces that answer individual questions. I would say the most useful is the one on common learner mistakes - always good to iron those out as soon as possible.

What’s you’re favorite classical Chinese piece? What significance does it have on how you live your life?

I really liked Six Records of a Floating Life (浮生六記). It’s an actual autobiography by a guy who lived in the Qing dynasty, which is interesting in itself, but it’s also quite a moving, human story as well. The guy makes a lot of mistakes in his life that we can all learn from. It’s also more accessible than most Classical stuff (it’s technically a Literary Chinese text, but pretty much the same as Classical).

In the past few months, you’ve started posting more Japanese-related articles: what makes Japanese attractive to you?

My Japanese is non-existent at the moment. I have a long-term goal to have at least some grasp of Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It’s going to take donkey years, but I think I’ll get there in the end. I’m currently focusing on Chinese in order to get my degree. I think the languages make an interesting set as they all use Chinese characters to some extent and the countries have closely linked histories, plus  they all historically used Classical Chinese.

Use Lingomi’s Chinese blog list to keep track of East Asia Student, and plenty of other Chinese-related blogs.

Ask 葛修远 (Hugh) a question!

Seeing one’s progress is an essential part of learning Chinese. The lack of progress is one reason that people give up on their resolutions or stop in the middle of a study plan. Recently I thought of a super simple way to track your Chinese progress.

Answer one question

Has your Chinese:
• a) improved
• b) gotten worse
• c) the same
• d) don’t know

If you answered (d)

Then you need to think about your learning more. You need to create goals and start tracking your progress.

If you answered (c)

You need to pay more attention to how you measure your level: Sometimes we don’t register improvements in our speaking or our reading/writing. Keep a journal of what you read, record yourself, and occasionally go back and compare your current skills with your past skills. You might be better than you think. Or you might have gotten worse.

Did you answer (b)?

Do you have a plan? Did you actually do what you said you’d do? no? then create triggers for your actions; or try anchoring your study to the start or end of your day. Pay attention to what mistakes you’re making and work on correcting them. Try taking some accountability. I wanted to make studying Chinese a part of my daily routine, so I publicly announced 52 Weeks of Chinese. If I fail to keep up with it, people will know. That motivates me to study more.

Answered (a)?

Good job. But you’re not done yet. Are your methods and materials still leading you towards your goal? Do you need to adjust anything? Take some time to savour the feeling, and then start planning for your next goal.

Actions you can take

• quickly assess your progress
• stop reading and do 5 minutes of studying.

What I did last week

This past week I’ve been extremely busy (but who isn’t). Last week I wanted to:

1. I’ll decide on topics to discuss and record myself discussing them.
   Update: I decided to talk about the following topics: great tennis players, Wall Street, the future of China, and learning Chinese. Four topics I love talking or reading about. I will post some of the recordings next week.
2. I’ll look into ways to test my character knowledge and calculate my Chinese level
   Update: I looked into different ways to test one’s character knowledge. Online, there are a couple tests that try to do this: Clavis Sinica’s really old character test, ZhToolkit’s Wordtest are the one’s I’m familiar with.
   
   Unfortunately, neither really fit my needs: They don’t accurately tell me how many characters I know. I prefer ZhToolkit’s test, but it doesn’t really give me what I want: a simple accurate assessment of my Chinese. I’m interested in how many characters I know, but I’m more interested in what my Chinese level is. I want something like the Chinese Scorecard I introduced last year. Since nothing really fits my needs, I’ve decided to build something myself. My Chinese Reading Level Test will test characters, words, and sentences, and will hopefully be able to accurately predict a learners Chinese reading ability. (If you’re interested in testing it out, contact me.)
3. I’ll look for some podcasts or downloadable online radio programs.
   Update: I didn’t spend any time looking for podcasts or downloadable online radio programs. I was hoping someone would offer some suggestions. Anyone have any suggestions for this?

Overall I’d give myself a B-/C+. I did less than I wanted, but studying Chinese is starting to become for of a habit.

The plan for next week

I’ve spent more time reading Chinese, and spent some time working on my spoken Chinese, but I’ve neglected listening. This week, I’ll keep up with my reading and introduce some listening activities.

1. Read 3 articles on 财新(http://caixin.cn).
2. Start adding words to my flashcard sets.
3. Look for a language partner.
4. Watch the Chinese news once.
5. Watch at least one online video with my wife.

Summary

Tracking your progress can be as simple as asking yourself one question: Has your chinese improved over the last month?

How are you studying Chinese this week? Tell me in the comments section below.

Leave a comment

When did you start writing a blog? Why did you start it?

I’ve been running a personal blog for almost ten years, which included articles about learning Chinese starting from around 2007. I decided to launch a site completely dedicated to learning Chinese in 2010, but I spent almost one year on preparations before launching Hacking Chinese officially in 2011. I started Hacking Chinese because I think it’s more or less unique (or at least I haven’t come across any other site which is completely dedicated to how to learn Chinese rather than what to learn).

What are the most important learning techniques you discuss on your blog?

This question is difficult because it requires a summary of everything I’ve done. If I have to choose, I would say than the most important articles on this website are the following (for more, check the essential articles category):

Learning Chinese words really fast (and related articles)

Goals and motivation (and related articles)

Chinese is fascinating, not stupid (and related articles about attitude)

Quick Questions

Mandarin vs. Dialects:
    Mandarin, but I like regionally flavoured Mandarin.
Traditional or Simplified:
    Traditional.
Pinyin or Characters:
    Characters.
Speaking/Listening or Writing/Reading:
    I love all four, but I love speaking most.

When did you start learning Chinese? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses?

I started learning Chinese in 2007. My strengths include a sincere interest in the language and a thirst for knowledge, combined with an analytical and open mind. My weaknesses include not having studied long enough (reading too slowly, etc.) and having quite lousy handwriting.

Why do you think most people learning Chinese struggle with the language?

Because they don’t think about what they are doing or if they do, they don’t have the right insights or knowledge. This is what I try to provide. Learning Chinese is hard and requires lots of time, but that doesn’t mean there are no shortcuts. There are so many things, both big and small, we can do to make learning easier. Take my series on building a powerful toolkit as an example. With it, learning Characters and words is quite easy; without it, it might feel hopeless.

What’s the one post on your blog that everyone learning Chinese should read? Why?

This would depend very much on the reader, but if we take into consideration that most people are beginners, I have to choose between my introduction to spaced repetition software and my article on how to learn Chinese words really fast. Since spaced repetition software is slowly gaining ground anyway, I choose Learning Chinese words really fast. I do this because I think it’s extremely important that people realise that Chines is very logical if you just spend some time trying to understand the logic. Learning can be fun and quite easy with the correct approach.

Use Lingomi’s Chinese blog list to keep track of Hacking Chinese, and plenty of other Chinese-related blogs.

Ask Olle a question!

Creating goals is the first step to finishing 52 Weeks of Chinese. Goals are important, which is why I blog about them a lot. If you don’t set any goals, you probably won’t advance as mush as you want. The new year is a great time to rededicate yourself to learning Chinese. Here’s what my goals look like:

The goals you create should be concrete, so I’m creating goals for the week, for the month, and goals for the quarter. At the same time, I’m also keeping a couple long term goals in mind.

My 52 week goals

I want my effective reading speed to be 70% of wife’s reading speed. Even though I can read Chinese, reading feels a bit like work. I think part of the reason is because I read slowly. If I increase my reading speed, I can compact my study times and cover even more material. And maybe reading Chinese will become more fun!

I want to learn the pinyin and meanings of 3000 hanzi. I’m making too many pinyin mistakes. Some of these mistakes occur because I don’t remember the pinyin for characters.

I want 2X listening skills. I listen to a lot of English podcasts, and in order to get through more of them, I listen at 2X speed. I want to be able to do the same thing for Chinese.

And of course, I want to express my personality equally well in English and Chinese.

Measure Yourself

Measuring progress or improvement is impossible without a first figuring out your baseline. If you’re just starting out, this is easy: your baseline is zero and anything you learn is an improvement.

But if you’re getting back into your Chinese studies (like I am), then measuring yourself is much more important (and a bit harder). When measuring yourself forget about the level your Chinese used to be. That’s the past. Focus on your present skills and the areas you want to improve. Based on my 52 week goals, I plan to do the following:

• Calculate my reading speed. I’ll measure my natural reading speed while reading from various news sources and topics.
• Calculate how many characters I know the pinyin and meaning for. It’s been a while since I really studied, so I don’t know how much I know.
• Find some audio sources that I can record to listen to.
• Record myself discussing 3-5 topics for 90-300 seconds. Over the course of the year, I’ll re-record myself when talking about one of those topics to see how much progress I make.

Actions you can take

1. Decide on some activities you will do every day or every week. (related)
2. Keep a journal of your activities.

What I’ve done this week

I’ve selected some articles to use as the basis of my reading proficiency. I’ve chose news articles from a few subjects: sports, economics, technology, etc. Each article is over 500 characters long. I’ve started reading these articles, taking note of how many words I’m looking up in a dictionary, and commenting on how difficult the article feels. Going by feeling isn’t an exact science, but it’s better than nothing. In all, I’ve done about 15 minutes of reading a day, which I do after eating dinner. To help read these articles, I’ve been using a Chinese Reader on a website I’m working on. If you’re interested in trying the beta out in a couple of weeks, sign up here.

The plan for next week

• I’ll decide on topics to discuss and record myself discussing them.
• I’ll look into ways to test my character knowledge and calculate my Chinese level
• I’ll look for some podcasts or downloadable online radio programs.

Summary

1. Create some goals
2. Measure your current level
3. Decide on actions to take
4. Keep track of what you do

What are your goals? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Week 0:

Why do this? Don’t you speak Chinese?

I do speak Chinese. I can also read and type at a nearly fluent level. But I have a lot of reasons for wanting to study more.

1. It’s hard to write about learning Chinese when you aren’t learning about it. I want to get back into the learners mindset. I also hope a more personal touch might be offer more chances to engage with readers of my blog.
2. My Chinese level is in a slow decline. At it’s peak, my Chinese was really good. My tones were on, my vocabulary was rich and I was able to effectively express myself whenever I wanted to.
3. It’s getting harder and harder to express myself. Now, I’m finding it harder and harder to express myself. Some of these challenges are situational: expressing feelings and talking about emotions with my wife is much harder than talking about the news; but much of it is structural: not being able to think of the right word, sentences flowing out in an awkward fashion.

What to look forward to

This year, posts will mostly consist of weekly reports about my study habits with occasional digressions on topics I’ve been thinking of. I’ll also write some Monthly reports to track the larger goals I’m working towards.

My ultimate goal:

My goal is still the same: I want to be able to express the same personality in Chinese and English. I want to be me in both languages.

What do you think?

Do you want your very own 52 weeks of Chinese? Have any suggestions for software, websites or materials I might want to look at? Leave a message in the comments.

syz (a.k.a. Steve) is responsible for two of my favorite blogs: Sinoglot (where he writes alongside Kellen Parker, et al.) and Beijing Sounds. If you love discussing Chinese, there’s no better place than on Sinoglot. And if you’re having trouble understanding local Beijingers, Beijing Sound will help you by break the conversation down.

Q: You write for two blogs: Sinoglot and Beijing Sounds. Tell me more about them. What goal do you have for creating them?

Well, asking about “goals” in the first place is probably giving me more credit than I deserve…

I started Beijing Sounds first, in 2007. At that point I’d been arguing with my Beijing mother-in-law — uh, I mean, learning Chinese — for about five years in the States. In the process I’d figured out that it was Beijing dialect I was learning, inadvertently, and that it wasn’t always what they taught you in books. Experiencing that “language outside the books”, and having a bit of a linguistics background, were all the excuse I needed to put up Beijing Sounds, which of course had to have recordings because I wanted to let folks hear the differences for themselves.

A couple years after starting Beijing Sounds, I’d finally become literate enough to want to blog about more than just oral language around Beijing. In that time I’d also met some other like-minded folks in similar situations: i.e. involved in a language niche somewhere in China but wanting to write outside of that niche. In January 2010 we put our chips together and came up with Sinoglot. As the tagline says, it’s “language in China, eclectically,” which means we try to bring up issues of linguistic interest that are taking place in China, but we don’t hold ourselves up to any standard of being the comprehensive source for all things language.

I think of both blogs as pretty focused on language and language culture in China, with Beijing Sounds being very narrow and deep (to the point of being hopelessly nerdy sometimes) and Sinoglot being, to abuse the spatial metaphor, more like an archipelago.

Q: If you had to pick a favorite post from each blog, what would it be?

For Beijing Sounds it’s hard to stop at one, so I won’t The readers’ favorite is probably the recording I posted just a few months into the blog. It’s my daughter and her Beijing grandmother bantering about how you change the meaning of 汤 (tāng) when you -r to it and say 汤儿 (tāngr). For some reason it’s a charmed post — maybe it’s the 5-year-old’s completely un-self-conscious burp in the middle of the recording? Anyway, it’s always had the most page views and I think it has the most comments.

For me personally, I’m a fan of the banter and subject matter of Silkworm Husbandry.

Now as for Sinoglot, I hope it doesn’t hurt our revenues for me to say this, but I like it more for the readers than the writing. Sinoglot readers are a stunningly erudite group of Chinese language aficionados — self-taught, tenured professors, and everyone in between — actively participating in conversations that might be sociolinguistic (Mandarin as future lingua franca) or esoteric, insider stuff (second round character simplifications) or random translation issues (“my ass is toast” for 我会嗝儿屁的).

Just read the comments on those posts and you get an idea how deep the knowledge is. I usually learn more from readers than I contribute to the conversation, and Sinoglot posts sometimes get comment counts that belong on a site discussing celebrity breast implants rather than a site for language nerds who are mostly well-versed in Mandarin.

Q: What’s the biggest mistake you made when you started studying Chinese?

Characters too early, then too late. As a complete beginner, not knowing where to start, I went through a lengthy period of writing dozens of characters dozens of times a day, long before I could say more than a few sentences. Naturally, it did squat for my language ability and discouraged the shǐ out of me. It would have been much more efficient to start learning vocab and grammar through pinyin.

Half a dozen years later, circa 2007, I was still putting off getting literate even though I had pretty decent conversational skills. That was a mistake too. If you want to function in Chinese society at anything above the level of polite chit-chat, you need to become literate. It’s a pain, but it’s doable, and I should have started doing it about three years earlier than I did. In 2007 I finally started and quickly realized I probably could have progressed much faster in the previous years if I’d been working on literacy.

Q: Is the increase in people learning Chinese a fad? What’s the appeal for studying this language?

If you define a fad as something that lots of people are intensely interested in for a short period of time, after which they lose interest in it, then Chinese learning is definitely a fad. But then, for Americans especially, most language learning is a fad because there’s little motivation to learn another language.

Since learning a new language always sounds like a good idea, the fad is always with us (I’m speaking as an American now). The only thing that changes is the country of our affections. To date myself, I’ll acknowledge being aware that there was a fad for learning Russian. After that it was Japanese, around the time that a square foot of Tokyo real estate could buy a gated mansion in Beverly Hills. Now it’s China.

I don’t see the fad as a bad thing, though. It never made sense that every bilingual Chinese/English speaker would be from China, but for a while it was almost true. Now not only are there plenty of Chinese-English bilinguals whose native language is English, there are also Chinese-X language bilinguals (usually polyglots) in practically every language you can imagine. If that change is a result of the fad, I see the fad as a Good Thing indeed.

With the fad has also come a change in attitude. Fifteen years ago, an expat coming to China on assignment would have had the attitude that Chinese is impossible, inscrutable — and never bothered to learn more than a nihao. Now, know folks even on three-month assignments who use their time in Beijing to buckle down and get in enough language study to direct taxis, order some food, and chit-chat a bit with monolingual coworkers. Believe me, they didn’t have to do this. You can get by in Beijing (and some still do) on English, sign language and written instructions to cab drivers. If the more open attitude is due to the fad, count me as a supporter.

Q: Why do you think most people learning Chinese struggle with the language?

In the first place I think a lot of people don’t divide up the task well. There’s listening, speaking, reading and writing. You’ve got to pick out tools and materials that are appropriate for your level in each of those areas and that’s not always easy to do. It’s not even easy for teachers. Back in the States I took a class from a (native Mandarin speaking) teacher who picked out materials that were, in retrospect, grossly mismatched to the students’ abilities. This was a class for “heritage” speakers, mostly Chinese-American kids. The listening exercises were laughably easy. The writing exercises were impossibly hard. That’s a good approach for making people feel like Chinese is a struggle.

Then across those four skill categories there are two major problems: how best to approach Hanzi literacy and how to create conversational opportunities. The Hanzi literacy problem is a whole topic in itself, so I’ll just stop here for now. It’s something I’m really interested in. The “conversational opportunities” problem is interesting too. If you’re studying Chinese outside China the opportunities are hard to find, but it’s becoming easier with websites that offer that kind of thing: Popup Chinese and ChinesePod come to mind. In China you’d think opportunities would be easy to find, but if you’re in a city of any size, the fact is that there are always going to be people around you who can speak English*. So for example in Beijing, even here in the heart of Mandarin-land, learners still often need to make an effort to identify opportunities for speaking practice.

*It would be interesting to talk to non-English speakers who have come to China. There’d be a lot of flabbergasted looks, I guess, at the idea that one could be a foreigner and not speak English.

Use Lingomi’s Chinese blog list to keep track of Sinoglot, Beijing Sounds and plenty of other Chinese-related blogs.

Have any Questions for syz?

Listening, in contrast, is a messy affair. It’s full of tone changes you aren’t expecting, it is layered with accents you’ve never encountered, speeds you aren’t used to, topped with grammar you haven’t mastered, and sprinkled with a heavy dose of words you never knew existed. It’s a recipe for confusion. You have almost zero chance of guessing what someone is about to say.

Control what you can control

In the midst of all this chaos, you can only really do two things. First, really focus on your listening. Second, relax and stay in the present. Sometimes someone’s pace will make you feel dizzy, and other times you might feel like they’re speaking some form of Chinese you’ve never studied. Don’t despair. It’s part of the process.

Listening to Chinese is tough, but the more you practice it, the more you’ll become familiar with the way Chinese feels.

Don’t think listening is the hardest part of learning Chinese? Tell me why in the comments.

Leave a comment

Lingomi’s Reading List goes behind Chinese blogs at looks at people who write them. This week, an interview with Albert of Laowai Chinese. Laowai Chinese is one of the earliest Chinese blogs I read. It’s also one of the few that has continued throughout the years. Albert Wolfe, the “Laowai” has led great discussions on his blog, published books on learning Chinese, and has even given us a new work of fiction (with both English and Chinese dialogue!) called faceless.

On a personal note, he’s inspired me to start a couple projects,  the Chinese Blog List, which tries to solve the problem of other Chinese blog lists by automatically updating itself so that stale blogs get automatically weeded out. As I mentioned in an earlier post, his description of the future Chinese dictionary caused me to push forward with the dictionary project I’d been thinking about for the past few years.

Q: What’s your blog about? Why did you start writing a blog?

LaowaiChinese.net gives tips for learning Chinese, especially speaking and listening. There are a lot of books and resources about learning to write the characters. But when I started my blog, I felt the literature was really lacking clear and detailed explanations about speaking and listening, especially the tones.

Q: When did you start studying Chinese? Why Chinese?

I started about 1 month before I came to China in 2005. I was intrigued by the mystique of “one of the hardest languages in the world” (for English speakers to learn) and also by the “world’s most spoken native language.” Of course, English is the world’s most spoken language, but most linguists consider Chinese to have the most native speakers (even though the dialects of Chinese make such a statistic a little bit tricky to nail down).

Q: What’s the biggest mistake you made when you started studying Chinese?

That’s an interesting question. I think my biggest mistakes were mostly in the affective (emotional / psychological) domain. For example, I remember feeling frustrated that I wasn’t farther along, angry at how hard the tones were, and disappointed that my friends preferred to speak English with merather than Chinese.

Q: What are your favorite posts from your blog?

My favorite part of having a blog is seeing people’s comments. That’s something you usually don’t get from a printed book. So, in that sense, the “Most Discussed” posts would be some of my favorites. As for posts that didn’t get a lot of comments, I still like the “Language Learning is Messy” series.

You’ve just published a new book: what’s it about? where can I get it?

faceless is my first novel. It’s an action / adventure story about the prevalence of social networks in our everyday lives and some of the dangers that can come from that.

It’s currently only available on Amazon (here). I also hope to make an e-book / Kindle edition available someday too, but because of some complex formatting in the text (including hanzi), the conversion process is a little bit tricky.

Try out Lingomi’s Chinese blog list. A simple way to keep track of Laowai Chinese and plenty of other Chinese-related blogs.

Leave a comment

Lingomi’s Reading List normally comments on Chinese and language-related articles around the web. After reading so many posts, I found myself wondering who was writing about Chinese on the web. So I decided to interview them, starting with Sara of Living a Dream in China.

Q: What’s your blog about? Why did you start writing a blog?

My blog is about my life in Guangzhou, China. About my Chinese language studies, my everyday life in the Middle Kingdom and my relationship with my Chinese boyfriend. I have been writing a blog in Finnish for years, but only last year decided to write in English too and launched the Living a Dream in China. The blog is my way to connect with a wider audience and share my experiences about living in this amazing country where everything seems to be different than back home in Finland.

Q: What’s the single hardest part of studying Chinese?

The part that needs the most effort is to learn to write Chinese characters by hand. Because I’m studying a Chinese language undergraduate degree, typing isn’t enough, we still need to write essays, homework and exam answers by hand.But the hardest part for me seems to be the grammar, atleast if you believe my latest HSK scores where my grammar score was quite embarrasing. In the beginning it may seem that there’s no grammar in Chinese but the deeper you go in the language, more grammar will come up.

Q: Do you have a goal you’re trying to reach? Tell us about it?

My goal with Chinese is to become fluent. Fluent for me means to be able to read Chinese novels, watch Chinese movies and communicate with Chinese people without too much effort. I will be satisfied when my Chinese becomes as good as my English, even though even my English is far from perfect. Exam wise I want to pass new HSK 6 with good points. At the moment I have passed old HSK level 5 and I’m trying the new HSK 5 next month.

I think it’s important to have short time goals as well as long term goals. It keeps you on the track and gives you satisfaction when you reach your goals.

Q: What advice would you give to a Chinese newbie?

I would like to say that if you relly want to learn Chinese, be patient and just hang in there. At some points it might feel like an impossible task, but it isn’t! Chinese people might not understand you in the beginning, but work with you pronunciation and tones and gradually you will notice that you can communicate with the native people.

Right in the beginning go to classes or hire a tutor. When you got the basics your can decide if you want to continue with this method or study by your self. But in the beginning it’s important to learn the pronunciation, tones, radicals and basic grammar. Having a teacher or a tutor to teach you and correct you is extremely valuable.

Q: What’s your favorite post on your blog?

This is a very hard question! The post that have been the most helpful to my self is doubtly Rate my Chinese! where I posted an audio clip of me reading Chinese. I got tons of feedback and advice how to improve my pronunciation. This post also has the most comments at the moment.

My readers’s favourite based on comment count is What is wrong with Western men in China?. When I published it I knew and hoped it would provoke a lot of discussion and it has. It’s a subject that people have lot to say about.

Q: How long have you been studying Chinese? Are you actively studying it?

I first studied Chinese in Finland from Autumn 2008 to the end of 2009. Then in the beginning of 2010 I moved to Guangzhou and studied Chinese as an exchange student at Guangzhou University. Finally this Autumn I started my Bachelor degree at Sun Yat-Sen University. So until now I have studied Chinese for more than three years. At the moment I’m studying very actively because Chinese language is my major at the university.

Try out Lingomi’s Chinese blog list. A simple way to keep track of Sara’s blog and plenty of other Chinese-related blogs.

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But what should you say when someone asks you to “say something in Chinese”? I’ve heard this phrase quite a lot (but less than “your Chinese is awesome!“), and over the course of time, I’ve come up with a few strategies that make this situation easier:

Ridicule them

我跟一个傻子说话，他根本不知道我在说什么。
Wǒ gēn yīgè shǎzi shuōhuà, tā gēnběn bùzhī dào wǒ zài shuō shénme.
I’m talking to an idiot and he doesn’t know what I’m saying.

问我这个问题的人是个二百五 。
Wèn wǒ zhège wèntí de rén shìgè èrbǎiwǔ.
The person asking me this question is an idiot.

Use this strategy with caution. Since usually, after hearing your Chinese, the person will ask you what you just said, which will force you to think up a “creative translation” of your fighting words. Plus it’s mean. I’ve only really used this with friends. (Read more about why 250 means idiot in Chinese.)

Dazzle them with tones

All you have to say is:

妈妈骂了马克的马吗？
Māmā màle mǎkè de mǎ ma?
Did mom scold Mark’s horse?

You’ll have the average non-chinese speaker reeling. I like this one because even a beginner can learn it, and it makes Chinese seem impossible, which–since you can speak it–must mean you are a genius.

Tongue Twisters

Similar to the “mother/horse” sentence, but on a slightly higher level. This works best if you know your tongue twister well. My favorite is:

吃葡萄不吐葡萄皮儿，不吃葡萄倒吐葡萄皮儿。
Chī pútáo bù tǔ pútáo pír, bù chī pútáo dào tǔ pútáo pír.
Eats grapes and doesn’t spit out grape skins; doesn’t eat grapes yet spits out grape skins.

The Classic

用中文说一句话。
Yòng Zhōngwén shuō yī jù huà.
Say something in Chinese.

This phrase turns the game back onto them. Some alternatives include asking what you should say in Chinese:

用中文说什么？
Yòng Zhōngwén shuō shénme?
What should I say in Chinese?

Be a showoff

Normally, it’s rare for someone to ask for you to showoff, but this question actually gives you the chance to showoff your skills (or that one phrase you practiced 10,000 times). And remember, regardless of what you say in Chinese, they’ll be amazed. Even if you mess up, they’ll still believe that Chinese is the hardest thing ever.

What do you say when someone asks you what to say in Chinese?

Leave a comment.

This post was inspired by this comment on Sinoglot

Whether you like them or not, dictionaries are the most important tool in a Chinese learners arsenal. We depend on our dictionaries for so much, but unfortunately, most dictionaries aren’t designed with the learner in mind. The Chinese dictionary project I’m starting will be, and I’m hoping it will grow to become one of the standard dictionaries used for learning Chinese.

How can you help?

If you’re interested in helping (or just keeping track of the project), here’s what you can do:

1. sign up for the newsletter
2. read about the the project
3. spread the word: tweet about it, facebook it, share it with interested parties.
4. write me (in the comments or by email)
   • give me suggestions for features you like
   • tell me stories about how a dictionary helped
   • write to me about the times when a dictionary wasn’t very helpful

Thanks for your help.

Figuring out what Chinese people say isn’t easy. They tend to speak very fast, and with accents different from the perfect Mandarin your teacher uses. Even the tones sound different than what you’d expect (because of tone sandhi).

You’d think that with all the things that make Chinese listening such a difficult skill, that Chinese learners wouldn’t make things harder for themselves. But they do.

Multitasking = not listening

Many years ago, computers brought us multitasking (doing two things at once), and since then people have convinced themselves that they, too, can multitask. People can’t multitask. Your brain isn’t good at task switching. Multitasking during listening practice, isn’t really practicing listening.

Here are some common examples of what people do but shouldn’t do. Avoid them.

1. Stop translating (interpreting) what you’re hearing. Lots of beginners translate themselves out of a conversation. They half listen and half match the Chinese words they hear with the English translations they know. This is very hard to do. Unless you’re a professional interpreter, trying to translate in your head is the quickest way to lose track of what you’re listening to.
2. Stop rewinding the conversation. It’s easy to get lost when someone speaks faster than you’re used to, or uses words you’re not familiar with. But the problem just compounds when you try to rewind the conversation and figure out what they just said. When you think about what someone said in the past, you’re missing out on what they’re saying right now. Instead of doting on what you didn’t catch, focus on what they’re saying in the present. You’re much more likely to figure out what you missed later on in the conversation.
3. Stop looking up words in a dictionary. Are you really capable of flipping pages, reading and listening to someone talk at the same time? I understand the desire to do this because it’s happened to me: you just have to know the meaning of the word you just heard for the first time. Don’t worry, you’re bound to encounter that word again, trust me. If you really must know what word they used, record the conversation and make notes later.
4. Stop the distractions. Don’t do your listening practice in a noisy environment. You shouldn’t have to ask your tutor to repeat themselves because the coffee shop you’re in is noisy.

If you avoid these pitfalls, you’re on the way to getting really good listening practice.


What’s keeping you from better Chinese listening?



Leave a comment

]]> http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/understanding-spoken-chinese-is-hard-enough/feed/ 8 http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/why-no-one-understands-your-chinese/ http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/why-no-one-understands-your-chinese/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:36:53 +0000 Steven Daniels http://lingomi.com/blog/?p=1420 First Impressions

Usually The first thing people notice is your pronunciation. They’ll judge how good/bad you are in the language based on that. Sometimes, though, you won’t even get that far. They’ll look at you and assume you don’t speak Chinese.

Priming

Priming is the effect where being exposed to a stimulus (e.g. a situation, a conversation, etc.) unconsciously influences later responses to later stimulus. In the language context, priming occurs whenever you talk to someone for the first time. When you are using Chinese to talk to someone you’ve just met, you are priming them to adjust to what they believe your Chinese level is. If they think you sound fluent, then they will speak normally (or close to normal); if they have trouble understanding you, they will speak slowly and try to use “simple words” (which sometimes makes the situation worse). If you’ve primed them to believe your Chinese is bad, they’ll believe your Chinese is bad.

Listening-to-foreigner mode

In some cases, your appearance is what primes the other person. Without having spoken, they unconsciously go into what I call “listening-to-foreigner mode”. In listening-to-foreigner mode, they don’t understand anything you are saying. They try to guess on your intent with every syllable that comes out of your mouth. This dual-processing takes a toll: they can’t actually listening to what you are saying, because they don’t have time to listen and process your words. That’s why sometimes even when you’re right, as far as they’re concerned, you’re wrong.

It is really frustrating when, at a restaurant, for example, you ask a waiter for something in perfect Chinese, only to have the waiter look at your Chinese friend in confusion. It’s not always your fault (well… sometimes it is ^_^;;). They want to avoid a misunderstanding and think it’s easier to ask your friend sitting next to you.

How to be understood

How you start a conversation can determine how well people will understand your Chinese. If you get the basics down, they will be primed for good Chinese and you’ll encounter this situation less.

Have any stories about being misunderstood? I’d love to hear them.

Write story in the comments

]]> http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/why-no-one-understands-your-chinese/feed/ 4 http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/chinese-blog-list-on-lingomi/ http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/chinese-blog-list-on-lingomi/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:34:39 +0000 Steven Daniels http://lingomi.com/blog/?p=1386 Keeping track of your favorite blogs can be hard. A while back, I made a little page that helps me keep track of what other Chinese-related blogs are doing. It’s called the “Chinese Blog List” (great name, right?).

Basically, it’s a listing of the most recent posts from the Chinese blogs you love to read, like to comment on, or have yet to discover. If your blog is missing from the site, please send me a note so I can add it. Check out Lingomi’s Chinese blog list.

Have any ideas on how to improve the Chinese blog list? Send your suggestions.



]]> http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/chinese-blog-list-on-lingomi/feed/ 5 http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/a-simple-way-to-test-your-chinese-listening-progress/ http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/a-simple-way-to-test-your-chinese-listening-progress/#comments Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:37:38 +0000 Steven Daniels http://lingomi.com/blog/?p=1381 It is hard to track listening skills; but it is possible to track your listening progress! Here’s how.

Create an audio collection

In order to track your listening progress, you have to compare your present self with your past self. A great way to do that is to re-listen to lessons, podcasts, programs and audio clips.

The first thing you need to do is save your recordings so that you can listen to them later. Use a smartphone or computer to record any audio, like radio or TV programs, that you don’t have your own recording’s for. You don’t need to keep and review everything you listen to, just the occasional recording.

Rate yourself

When listening to audio (like a lesson, podcast, or broadcast), rate how well you understand it on a scale of 1-10 (1 = don’t understand anything, 10= understand everything). There’s no rule on how you should rate things. You could create a score system where starting from 10, you subtract 0.5 for sentences you don’t understand, or 1-3 points if it is too fast. The key is to try and remain consistent.

Come back one month later

Set up a schedule to listen to the audio again (add a reminder in Google Calendar, it will send you an email when it is time to go back and review) in a month or so.

When you get the reminder, listen to the audio again, assigning a new rating. Then look at your old rating and compare it to the new one (don’t peek beforehand!). You might find it much easier than before (a great sign), or you’ll find it as confusing (a sign you need to practice more).

Bonus: Advanced listening progress tracking

If you want to understand your listening progress on a deeper level, try the following. Make notes after listening. What made the passage easy or hard? The speed? The vocabulary? The topic? The sentence structure. Make more notes after listening to the passage the next time. Comparing your notes will usually provide a clear understanding of what progress you’ve been making.

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]]> http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/a-simple-way-to-test-your-chinese-listening-progress/feed/ 2 http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/how-good-are-my-listening-skills/ http://lingomi.com/blog/2011/10/how-good-are-my-listening-skills/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 01:47:06 +0000 Steven Daniels http://lingomi.com/blog/?p=1376 One of the reasons I believe listening skills get less attention than others is because there’s no good way to grade listening skills. Basically, you only care about what you can measure. That’s why Chinese learners spend so much more time focusing on characters.

Metrics for characters are simple

Reading and writing skills are easier to judge and spoken skills. Chinese characters make it easy to determine one’s reading/writing skills. Essentially, you find out which characters a learner can read or write, and what grammar patterns they’re familiar with. Most people do an even simpler calculation: how many characters do you know? That number can gives a pretty concrete answer to how good your Chinese is. It’s easy to understand and simple to test. If only testing listening skills was that simple.

Listening Metrics: It sounds more complex than it is

Actually, the way to determine someone’s listening level is clear:
(Y vocabulary level)*(X words per minute) = your listening skill.

If you can understand University level vocabulary at native speed, then your listening skills should be at or near a native speakers level. If you can only understand a basic Chinese dictated at a slow pace, then you have basic-level Chinese. What makes this complex is how easy comprehension can be affected by slight changes: changing the either vocabulary or speed can have a drastic effect on comprehension. A listener who did very well on an intermediate level test, might not understand much at all if the vocabulary level was increased.

The ultimate listening test would test you using different speeds and different vocabulary levels. You’d end up with results like: I understand 50% of Level-3 vocab at 60 wpm (words per minute); I understand 35% of a Level-3 dialogue at 70 wpm. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist yet.

Real ways to test your listening skills

I’ve been thinking about the issue for a while, and have come up with a few ideas on how to better determine someone’s listening skills.

1. what does this mean? Listen to a passage and get the learner to repeat or discuss the general meaning of the passage. The better your listening skills, the more accurate your restatement will be. If you understand most but not all of the dialogue, you’ll be able to summarize it relatively well, but won’t be able utilize the same level of vocabulary. Obviously, this test must be on a scale. Playing an advanced dialogue for a beginner to summarize won’t produce any useful results. Giving out grades requires one to have a lot of data on what students at different levels generally understand.
2. The number test. Say a string of numbers at ever increasing speeds and get the listener to repeat the numbers. How fast (in wpm) was the speaker talking? (This test probably depends too much on memory).
3. Play a dialogue (scaled) at different speeds. The learner indicates when when they start getting confused (e.g. when they stop processing the dialogue). As long as you don’t cheat, this would be a pretty good method.

And here’s one not great way to do it:

1. I’ve found the HSK test to contain many “gotcha” questions. Essentially, they’ll play a dialogue and then throw in one phrase or sentence that drastically changes meaning of the dialogue. I’ve seen many dialogues where the answer hinged on one word. You could literally understand 99% of the dialogue and because you missed the one “gotcha” word, you’d get the answer wrong. I sincerely hope the new HSK has fewer of these questions.

How do you test your listening skills? Let me know in the comments.



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