Mandarin B2 listening practice

B2  汉语听力练习...more

Mandarin B1 listening practice

B1 汉语听力练习... more

How to improve your Mandarin listening skills

Listening skills of Mandarin are another issue when learning this language. Many learners are struggling with listening even though they can speak good Chinese.

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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