Is it normal to struggle so much with understanding spoken chinese?

Chinese Language Questions
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I am going through “My teacher is a martian”, one of the most basic graded readers from the Mandarin Companion series. I have learned all of the 150 characters and words that the book uses (both understanding and producing).

When I read the book, I can understand it really well (apart from some complicated grammar structures).

But when I try to listen to the audio version of the book, oh boy I struggle so much to understand what is going on. I even cut the audio book up and have it repeat each sentence several times before it advances to the next one, and even when slowed down to 40% of the original speed, I still struggle massively, and understand only the sentences that I studied before over and over again.

Is there any specific way to practice listening comprehention? Does it get easier fast? It is extremely dishartening as I have already learned Spanish, Portuguese and French just by learning some most common words and then just immersing watching netflix and listening to audiobooks, and it worked, but it doesnt seem to with chinese. Those most basic graded readers seem too advanced. My idea was to decompose the Mandarin Companion books and listen to them on reapeat but it is tough. Please advise and share your experiences!

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Yes. A couple of things:

A) Reading you can do at any pace you want. If you were forced to read at speaking speed, you probably would also struggle. Also the ability to parse speech sounds into meaningful words takes a long time to develop compared to reading different scripts.

B) With romance languages you can more or less cheat with cognates. For Chinese, there are essentially 0 cognates.

C) You probably have more exposure to reading and thus are better at it.

No matter the case, there’s no secret here. You need more practice, like hundreds to thousands of hours.

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lorentz covered basically everything already, but as for what content to practice with, something that helped me greatly was just going to youtube and searching “HSK1 stories” or “HSK1 listening practise” etc. You’ll find heaps of videos to practice listening. One of my favorites is Alison Mandarin. She has a whole playlist of “Slow Chinese Stories for beginners”:

When starting I just took it one story at a time, watching at half speed and pausing regularly as my brain tried to catch up. I listened to each of them a few times until it stop being painful, then moved to the next one. As you get used to it, it gets easier and you can move onto the HSK2-3 stories etc. But yeah, it’s just practise - there isn’t some shortcut, just actively listen to Mandarin audio that’s close to your level a LOT!

For me, when learning to understand spoken Mandarin I made half the progress with twice the effort compared to German. It’s just soo far removed from English (my native language) that native Chinese media is not even worth watching - just a wall of sound. Had to start with the easy stuff and work up (and I’m not even at native media yet, but at least the ~HSK3 level is starting to click so I’ll get there, but it’s a long road).

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Yes for me as well. Lorentz and Kaysik said all that’s needed. I’ll just add a link to Olle Linge’s Hacking Chinese with a list of free Chinese listening resources:
The best free Chinese listening practice for all levels | Hacking Chinese. He also has another link there with a few simple but effective ideas how to simplify listening practice (get cheap wireless headphones, have a level-suitable audio always available, etc).

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And definitely don’t overlook the power of repetition. When I started out, I listened to audio from a variety of resources, but mainly focused on textbook audio dialogues. Whatever the resource, I would:

  1. Try to listen to it by itself multiple times, with no transcript.
  2. Try to listen to it by itself multiple times, this time with optional list of vocab words if available.
  3. Finally listen and read along with the full transcript to clear up anything that was not clear.

Then, I would take the snippet of audio and play it on my phone while walking around or doing chores or whatever. I usually had a “listening playlist” of the last week or whatever of new audio snippets. I would listen to that on repeat, getting exposure to the same dialogue or snippet of audio multiple times over the following week before finally retiring it.

When I later moved onto watching dubbed anime, I would take a generally similar approach. People get hung up on how it can be “boring”, and I certainly did at first. But I found it more enjoyable in the end as one can get a greater degree of comprehension, and thus satisfaction, from a more repetition heavy approach. I think I ended up watching (or “listening”) the dubbed version of Hunter X Hunter like 4-5 times. :laughing:

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I am writing this with a very sad tone (tone4 perhaps? ; ), because I feel I am about to totally give up on Chinese.

I’ve listened to the first chapter of the graded reader for about 80 times, no shit. Like I’ve mentioned before I cut up the audio book by sentences and have them repeated before it advances to the next one like so:

Sentence 1
Sentence 1
Sentence 1
Sentence 1

Sentence 2
Sentence 2
Sentence 2
Sentence 2

Sentence 3
Sentence 3
Sentence 3
Sentence 3
…

My brain just cannot make any sense of those monosyllabic words!! :confused:

I also cannot put up with SRS any more, the lack of progress in comprehension makes it feel totally futile ( even though it is only 150 chars from the mandarin Companion in Anki, - Ive done this even before I found out about HanziHero)

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I feel like the third tone fits defeat better.

Try a different aproach or a different resource. I use the graded readers on Hello Chinese and on the Mandarin Bean website, as well as the lazy chinese website. I find that shorter stories (about 1 minute) work better for me in order to keep focused. Also both of these resources are very streamlined so you can just get on it and do what you need to do instead of wasting time on prepping like cutting up audio, organizing files or making flash cards.

Also I do not like to use youtube videos because the platform is too distracting. I have a browser (vivaldi) set up just for my listening practice with mandarin bean and lazy chinese. Lazy Chinese embedds the youtube videos with a transcript right under it that you can follow after listening/watching the video.

buttons for the websites go on the bottom left. Super clean, no distractions.

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Seconding hello chinese. The native speaker video exercises are excellent

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It may be appropriate to focus on other aspects of Chinese, such as reading for instance. There are many people who learn to read Chinese (or French, etc) but never how to speak, and not really how to listen to it. I think it depends on one’s overall goals. I would also be curious to hear what the graded reader audio is like, it may be that it is simply too fast, and that slowing it down to a lower speed may be beneficial.

Anecdotally, your post made me remember a post I came across by the famous polyglot Alexander Argüelles - Wikipedia on a forum when I was doing my initial resource on how to learn Chinese (or any language, generally):

Of course I was tempted to learn modern Chinese - learn it and with one fell swoop you will have learned to communicate with 1/6 of the people on the planet - what other language can offer this? I did make several stabs at it, but you are exactly right, I was “turned off by the tones.” Pax to you and all who love it and to Victor and all whose tongue it is, but I really find Chinese to be an incredibly ugly language. I tried to overcome this purely subjective prejudice by focusing on its importance, but as I must initially learn languages by intensive shadowing, I just couldn’t do it. After only a few minutes of shadowing Chinese, I begin to feel very unpleasant physical sensations because my entire auditory system is offended by what I am hearing, and it is as if my vocal tract is saying “stop! this hurts me! I don’t want to make these sounds! please stop!”

I think this little annecdote about myself illustrates a very important principle of polyglottery, namely the principle of affinity. I do not believe it is possible to learn a language that you do not like. I think that one reason why many people study but fail to learn a language, and why they do not enjoy the process, is because they do not feel any affinity for the language they are studying. It is all well and good to go after a language becuase it is important or useful or for whatever other reason you like, but if you not like the way the language looks, sounds, and feels, I think you had better make another choice. That is to get started learning, but to take it to a deeper level and really master a language, I think it is necessary to appreciate the cultural aesthetics of a language - its cuisine, its music, its art, its literature. I’ve found that respect for the tradition is not quite enough - these things must actually appeal to you. You should explore these things when choosing a language, and carefully consider the feelings of affinity or antipathy that develop as you progress in your studies in order to determine whether or not to continue. Those who learn a language because they have to do not have this luxury, but those who learn languages out of love should not be burdened with something they cannot love.

Here’s the post (message 21 of 71).

It’s definitely not an easy language. All I can say learning it to any decent level of proficiency will be met with many setbacks, and the best plan one can have is to be ready to change your plan. Speaking for myself, I continually hit roadblocks but get around them by focusing on other things or really honing in on the one thing I feel is most important, regardless of frustration.

Best of luck in your endeavors! 加油！

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Sorry to hear about your experiences thus far :frowning:

I looked at the first chapter of “My Teacher is a Martian” and I think the issue is – while one can comprehend it reading – it can be awfully complicated for your first step into listening.

For context, I started listening practice with sentences like these:

我很好。你呢？
他們多很好。
你是中國人嗎？
他是美國人。

These are very simple, very short and mostly structurally the same sentences. Even then, it’d take me at least ~40 listens of these same three sentences, over and over, to understand what’s being said, tones and all :sweat_smile: I specifically remember having a hard time discerning the 中, for example :slight_smile:

Looking at the chapter – already complicated by using names instead of pronouns which can throw you off – there doesn’t seem to be as much structural repetition, and the sentences are quite long with commas interspersed. The key is not only repeatedly visiting the sentences, but that the sentences themselves have repetitious elements in succession (e.g. 他是)

Maybe something like this would be more helpful – the gestures and more deliberate enunciation should help, and the sentences seem to be shorter and there doesn’t seem to be any names either. I wouldn’t be sure how to compares to the mandarin companion audio though :slight_smile:

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