Get the Right Listening Materials to Learn Chinese

In order to converse freely in Chinese, one has to have relative good ability of listening comprehension. In this article, our Chinese tutor skype has concluded some of the coolest tips on choosing appropriate listening materials so that you improve your listening ability in the right and effective way!

First of first, please remember: Just listening to anything you come by is NEVER a good idea! The audio/video materials you use should be:

Interesting and Relevant

Stay motivated and focused by listening to short clips on topics you’re genuinely interested in!

If you’re also familiar with the topic and it is relevant to your learning goals — i.e. directly related to the type of situations and conversations you want to be able to understand and use the language in, you’ll get a lot more out of it.

Suitably Challenging

Does this mean that you should listen to materials that you can understand fairly easily or should you challenge yourself with something a bit harder?

Yes, you should listen to things you find easy. Not only does this help boost your confidence, it’s also the best way to get to a point where you can instantly recognize and understand words you know as they’re spoken to you in real time.

Yes, you should definitely challenge yourself with something a bit harder. In the real world you’ll frequently NOT understand everything you hear. By practicing listening to more challenging materials you can learn to cope with this reality and get better at guessing what things mean.

But, this doesn’t mean that listening to recordings where you understand next to nothing is ideal — far from it! Instead, you should understand most of what you hear and figure out the meaning of unfamiliar bits where necessary.

Transcribed (in pinyin and/or characters)

As often as possible, listen to clips that come with a transcript so that you can compare what you think you heard to what was actually said!

To really make the most of the transcript, try to write down what you hear word-for-word first, and then use the transcript to check what you missed and got right. This is easily one of the most effective ways to develop your ability to make sense of natural connected speech.

As Real as Possible

Simply because real spoken Mandarin sounds VERY different from scripted and rehearsed speech recorded by actors at slower than normal speed and perfectly “standard” pronunciation… To get used to and prepare yourself for the real thing, listen to recordings of real people speaking naturally and spontaneously.