The most difficult part

belalmamdouh
 February 24, 2015, 07:22 PM posted in I Have a Question

How can I improve my listening skills?

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he2xu4
 February 25, 2015, 02:42 PM

In addition to the audio lessons here, I listen to as many different sources as I can:

  • Popup Chinese (Dialogues are a little faster paced than here)
  • Slow Chinese
  • The Chairman's Bao
  • Chinese news websites that provide transcripts of newscasts
  • TV shows and movies that have transcripts. Go to subom for subtitles. Shows like A Bite of China.
  • YouTube channels like TMD Shanghai.

Basically, my MO is variety, hear as many different people talk as possible.

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he2xu4
 February 28, 2015, 03:32 PM

Here's a tech podcast I listen to. The level of Chinese is beyond me. I struggle with comprehension, but my profession deals with technology so it's very interesting for me to hear a Chinese pov even if I don't pick everything up. Imho, I think trying to listen to a speaker that's too fast for you helps, makes you try harder. But it feels real good when you do understand a lot of what's being said, these are native speakers going at normal speed.

《IT 公论》

《IT 公论》由 IPN 出品、李如一和 Rio 主持，首播于二零一三年十一月。本节目系一种综合性之科技节目。收听对象，并不限于社会上某一阶层。凡职业部门不同，知识水准互异，而对于科技有共同兴趣者，从任何角度，收听此秀，不致味同嚼蜡，毫无所得。一切题材，即就雅俗两极之范围内，伸缩去取，尽量适用多方面之需要，以求俗不伤雅，雅不背时。

And another thing I do for pieces that have no audio, I use Pleco to do TTS. It's not a real person speaking, but at least I'm listening to something I really want to read/listen to. Pleco's TTS is pretty good, a little better the OS X TTS.

One silly thing I tried for dialogues I have problems understanding - I playedthe audio to speech to text converters/dictation software. They failed miserably for dialogues like the podcast above. Just too fast. No love there.