Improving your Mandarin listening, speaking and reading skills. Learning Chinese online at www.mandarin247.com
17 October, 2018
11 August, 2018
How to improve your Mandarin listening skills
Shall we clarify whether you have the ability to listen or not? Some people, including myself, are an example - even if they understand their own native languages, they are not good listeners. A good listener has the ability to be willing to listen, to pay attention to details, to identify certain sounds, to remember, to take clear notes etc.
There is divided opinion as to whether foreign language learners should learn listening first or speaking first. For adult learners, I don’t think you can separate listening and speaking.
To improve listening skills, (if you are not a child), my personal teaching experience is that students should understand writing before listening. Just imagine, if you don’t understand the writing, how could you understand when other people say it? So to improve your listening skills, you must:
- Be a good listener – improve your native language listening skills first especially those listening skills mentioned above.
- Increase your range of vocabulary and understand the sentence structures.
- Understand the background and context.
- Listen for gist or details.
- Train your ear to get used to a Mandarin speaker’s sound in different ways - watch videos, films and listen to the radios or different audio materials as a regular practice every day 10 - 20 minutes.
- When learning a new topic (not revision), not forget to completely understand the text of whatever you are listening to. Then retell what you have heard.
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How to improve your Mandarin reading skills
The most difficult part
of reading Chinese is character recognition. For beginners, if you are a part
time learner, it would be beneficial to learn and recognise at least 25
characters per week, so after one month, you would be able to recognise 100
characters. After 10 months, you would have learned 1000 characters, then you
will surprise yourself about character recognition.
There are two main
reading skills to develop apart from Chinese character recognition:
1: Scanning
When you have limited
time to read, you need to do scanning. For short text, a tip is to recognise
key words that indicates the author’s ideas.
2: Reading in depth
When you read an article
in Mandarin, to completely understand the article, it is called reading in
depth, or reading all the details. To help to understand a long article you
must:
- Understand the structure of the article or text
- Find out specific information or opinions by those conjunctions or linking words. What are conjunctions or linking words.
- Understand and recognise special expressions or implied meanings. e.g. Chinese idiom 五十步笑百步 literally it means ‘50 steps laughing at 100 steps’. But it real meaning in English is ‘The pot calling the kettle black’.
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