I think it is more useful to find audio that is intrinsically slow instead of applying a slow-down effect in a media player or YouTube or whatever.
I hope to make a video at some point describing a good process for getting to a level where one can understand just barely enough of Chinese that watching a show is somewhat useful and enjoyable (e.g., understand ~50%).
How I did this is as follows:
First I listened to the dialog audios provided with any textbook series. These recordings have three important attributes that will help you:
- It is much slower and simpler than native speaking.
- They are associated with a chapter in the book, which will have a “new vocabulary” list, identifying words you may not know yet.
- They have a full transcription of the audio you can read along to.
However, the key is how you use this valuable resource! Like so:
- Listen to audio alone on repeat. Do this as many times as you can bear, trying to parse the language phonetically (recognize which sounds are being said) and a bit semantically (try to map those sounds to the words/meanings you know). You will not understand most of it, but that’s fine!
- Listen to audio on repeat while looking at the associated “new vocab list”. Try to better understand the sounds and words you hear in the audio by mapping them to the words in the list. That list will have pinyin, allowing you to also better understand the sound->pinyin mapping. You will understand a bit more, now.
- Listen to the audio on repeat while reading along with the transcript. At this point you will be able to “understand” all of it… because there is a character-per-character transcript with direct English translation in front of you! This will help you cover any remaining gaps.
- (The next couple of days later) Carve out some time to listen to that same audio on repeat once more while walking around or doing chores. You already have memorized it by now, but just listening to it will allow you to work with it a bit more with “no training wheels”.
This method is how I got from “can’t understand ANYTHING” to “able to dive into children cartoons” within a couple of months. Of course, I could understand very little of the childrens cartoon, but they key was getting to the point where immersing in native material was bearable and marginally useful. After that, I would try other techniques like watching episodes multiple times, sometimes with subtitles, sometimes without, and so on. But this post is getting long so I’ll save those strategies for another day.