chinese-listening-diu - source

Full transcript of chinese-listening-diu. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYKTJZilKdw

If you’re studying Chinese, then you’re 100% going to run into a situation where you walk up to someone to try to talk to them only for the reply to sound like this. The question is, is it that they’re talking too fast, or is there a gap somewhere in your listening skills? Chinese is known as one of the hardest languages in the world because of the characters. But what a lot of people get wrong is the fact that what makes it one of the hardest languages in the world is actually just how hard it is to practice your listening skills. especially because sometimes you might think you’re hearing Mandarin, but you’re actually not. So, today I’m going to share with you my secret language learning framework that helps you. By the way, wait, before I get into that, this isn’t advice from some native speaker who grew up with the language and has no idea what the hell kind of struggles learners have, right? This is advice from someone who spent thousands of grueling hours going from zero to conversationally fluent. Someone who went through all the embarrassing blank stairs and awkward pauses so you don’t have to. And so my team of coaches and I over at the Cantono Blueprint have helped over 600 Cantonese speakers get speaking Mandarin while improving their Cantonese. And so we’re on a mission to change how ABC’s learn their native language. So hopefully today we can help you too. And trust me, if you incorporate it properly, this will make understanding native speakers a lot easier for you because it all starts with this or what I call the DIU framework which stands for differentiation, identification, and understanding. Because when someone tells me they’re bad at listening, I don’t know what a native speaker said to me. It was so fast. I always say, “Which stage of listening did you mess up on?” The do framework is the core listening framework that I used to help me get from zero Mandarin to conversational. And it’s the core framework that my team drills into our students. And don’t worry, it’s not the generic, you know, listen to music, watch movies, watch drama type thing. But to help us understand why you don’t know what native speakers are saying when they talk to you really fast, first we need to define what being bad at listening even means, I’m actually going to give you a sentence in English. The postitudiness in Amirada’s ubiquitous influence was felt across the world. You know what I said? You probably didn’t understand what that meant. Using the same logic as we use when we, you know, we say, “Oh, you know, I heard Chinese speakers speak and I didn’t understand.” Does that mean then that your English listening skills are bad? Of course, it doesn’t. And so that means when we hear something and don’t understand, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are bad at listening. It doesn’t mean that our listening skills are crap because you’re a native speaker, okay? You’re not a bad English listener. You know which words in that sentence you don’t know. You’re also able to differentiate politudinis, in amorada, and ubiquitous as three separate words. And that’s the first stage to mastering listening. Let me explain. See, people hear a Chinese person speak really fast, then once they don’t understand anything, they beat themselves up. But actually, listening occurs in stages. And the biggest problem typically is that they skip to the last one too fast. And so these are the three stages of listening as mentioned earlier. Differentiation, identification, and understanding or do for short. Let me expand on each one and how they’re going to help you. Step number one, differentiation. This is where you’re able to differentiate first off that the sentence I read earlier was in English and not French or Spanish. Then secondly differentiate each word in that sentence. This is how you know that in that sentence I gave we have exactly 10 distinct words. The postrudinous and Amirata’s ubiquitous influence was felt across the world. Regardless of whether you understand the words or not, you know there are 10 distinct words in that sentence. This may feel easy, but listen to Hindi or Arabic for instance and you realize you don’t know how many distinct words are in a sentence. Listen to Hindi and Pjabi and you’re probably even able to differentiate which is which. And so at a more relatable level, listen to and if you’re a new learner, you probably can’t tell which is which, which I’ll get deeper into later. And so we see that that first stage differentiation actually takes a lot of effort to get past. It requires exposure and training with the language to properly differentiate it along with an understanding of its pacing and cadence. And it’s the reason why if I say an amorada, you’re able to tell right away it’s one word and not two words, even if you have no idea what it means. It’s the reason why if you’re a Cantonese speaker and you hear me say tantang, you’re able to identify that as one word, restaurant, instead of two, because your brain is trained to differentiate these languages. The next step is identification. Step two, this is where you’re able to clearly identify each word in that sentence. And so you’ve identified the makeup of the word and even if you don’t understand it, you’re able to look it up no problem, right? I’m assuming you likely have a rough idea of how to spell each word you don’t know in that sentence just now, right? Like in amorada, uh, you know, postudinous, you know, p u l c h ratudinous r i t u d i n o, something like that. in amiratada, you know, I N A M O R A T A ubiquitous. U B I Q UI T O U S. Okay, you know, something like that. And if not English, by the way, let’s say you’re a French listener, you know, same thing in your native language, right? The whole essence is it sounds easy and second nature, but that’s only because it’s in a language you’re good at, English. If I say something in French, you probably have no ability to properly identify the words to even look them up. For example, you might not even be able to differentiate how many distinct words there were in that sentence. And so identification requires exposure and training with the language as well. Then finally, we have understanding. And this is the last stage and this simple whether or not you understand the words in the sentence or whether or not you can make an inference on the meaning of the words in the sentence that you don’t know. So you probably have no idea what politudinis in Amirata’s ubiquitous means, but you know it probably has to do with someone’s influence, right? The politudinis in Amirata’s ubiquitous influence. You know that enemir is probably a noun and we’re talking about its ubiquitous influence. So the influence of the enamora, you know that pudrudinis is probably describing the enemirata. And so while you have no idea what these words mean, you can make an educated guess. But more importantly, since the first two stages, differentiation, understanding, are finished and you know what words you don’t know, you can just look up the three unknown words to complete stage three and fully understand the sentence. And that’s the key to this puzzle because typically people skip to stage three understanding when learning a new language and they get frustrated when they can’t understand anything. But the thing is though, this step is not important. You’re an expert in English listening and you didn’t need to understand all those specific words in that sentence I just gave you. You knew what was missing and you can easily look those up in the dictionary on your own time so you can gain that understanding. So before I tell you how to practice each stage, I never again want to hear you say, “I’m bad at listening.” Okay? Like what the hell do you do with that, right? Which which stage are you bad at? Okay? It’s like going to a doctor and saying, “I’m sick.” And he’s like, “Uh, now I got to figure out what they’re sick with.” You don’t have a doctor to figure out what you’re sick with. So it helps to be able to identify yourself. By the way, if you want coaching with our team, there’s a link down below. Check it out. And so, you need to see, okay, like I need to work on differentiation. I need to work on identification rather than I’m bad at listening. Now, the cool thing about this is when you realize this, it changes the way you perceive someone speaking really fast at you. Because even someone who speaks at Lightning McQueen speed, if you’re able to differentiate and identify all the words, even if there’s a good chunk you don’t understand, that’s a win for you. And so, what this does, it turns anything into listening practice. Okay? someone talking to you super fast, you don’t need to understand. Just just practice identification and differentiation. So, that being said, let’s get into how we specifically practice your listening. Now, specifically differentiation and identification. The first way is songs. Let’s not just like listen to some songs like an airhead. Okay? We’re specifically using songs to practice our differentiation and identification with a very specific framework for absorbing the song. Okay? I hear it all the time. I’m using songs to learn Mandarin. I’m like, okay, how much manner can you speak? They’re like zero, right? Like there’s a framework you have to listen with. Otherwise, like I mean I’d be fluent in Japanese now because I watch anime all the time, right? And that framework for songs is LPU or listen pinion understand. Here’s how it works. First off, listen to the song once and just get a feel for it. Okay? Start trying to differentiate and identify individual words in songs. Okay? You don’t need to understand anything. You probably won’t. Just start differentiating and identifying bits of opinion on your own. see what you hear and identify. Okay? Okay. If you don’t understand any of that, but you’re able to differentiate all the individual words and define the opinion and the spelling for all of them, that’s a win. That is listening practice. Okay? You don’t need to understand it. You need to be able to hear hiisha as four distinct characters as opposed to one mumbo jumbo blob. And ideally you can also identify okay GW h a i g j i d e n i and s h u o if you can just do that you win. You don’t need to be able to understand it. And by the way with this framework you don’t have to succeed at step one before you go step two. Okay? Just do it once or twice. Hear it. Just get a feel for the song. But after that, even if you don’t hear anything, it just sounds like mumbo jumbo. That’s fine. Move on to step two. And step two is pull up the lyrics for the song in pinion. Just Google the song name and add pinion after it. Now listen to the song again, but just start differentiating and identifying all the opinion in the song while you So listen to it while you’re reading the lyrics. And when I say reading the lyrics, you’re reading the opinion, okay? You don’t don’t care about the translation of the song or whatever. Just read the opinion of the song. Remember, you don’t need to understand yet. You’re just practicing differentiation and identification. Okay? Listen to it a couple times like this. And if for example you see pinion lyrics that you can’t hear, slow down the song and play it back till you hear it. For example, if the lyric is but you hear, slow it down. Okay? And train your ear. Look at the pinion lyrics and train your ear to hear. This will help your brain to differentiate the sounds and identify them. Last step is always easiest one. Okay, understand. Pull an opinion now and see if you’re still able to differentiate. It should be a lot easier now. Okay, and if you are, then I can start looking at the English lyrics and understanding what all the individual words mean. Again, understanding is the easiest step. It literally is that easy. And I prepared a Spotify playlist of my favorite Mandarin songs that I think are great for practice. These artists annunciate clearly and the songs aren’t too fast. Those in the JC Chow, the guy who was singing the song I just sang, he’s known to be a mumble singer. So, in this playlist I’ve compiled, the lyrics are not too complex or poetic. Just find a song you like and practice in these three steps. Okay, this is a fantastic way to learn because all songs come with pinions. So, it’s super easy. Songs are something that you can listen to over and over and over again as well if you like it, which is even better. And it’s something that you can practice at any time. Like to this day, I still use this framework whenever I hear a new Chinese song. And it makes it easy for me to understand. And I learn even complex poetic songs like Fansa. And it makes it super easy because I just go through the framework. Word of warning though before you use this framework is one, don’t try and learn pronunciation for words off of songs. And what I mean by that is specifically the tones. You can easily throw off your tone pronunciation by learning from songs. Imagine singing [Music] versus saying it. And so what I mean by that is like the word, right? You can practice pronunciation in terms of like right. So remember because he’s saying he’s saying the word, right? the artist, but he’s not saying it in the right tone. He’s saying like that, like a little upton tone like that because of the song. And so, you can use the song as a reference for how it’s pronounced, but not for what tone a character should be. Second warning, you will become a karaoke god after this. This is a good thing. Chinese karaoke is so much better than English karaoke. And this is the reason why I know like literally every single Chinese song at karaoke. Okay? Try and learn two to three songs per week using the LPU method. And I used to do it on the train, to work, you know, at the gym. It’s just listen to music really, okay? But listen to music with intention. Next method of practicing, watching shows and movies, okay? Now, personally, I don’t really watch that much TV. And also, Chinese TV doesn’t always come with English subs. Even when it does have English subs, my experience with anime tells you that, you know, just because you watch a lot and read English subs doesn’t mean you’ll learn anything. I can’t speak Japanese still, except for Dai. Now, of course, watch TV if you like, cuz obviously more exposure is always better. But I don’t really recommend it until your differentiation and identification are really good. Here’s why. For the TV show to be good, you obviously have to understand it, which means you’ll probably looking at the English subs and not really focused on the DI of the DIU framework. On the other hand, songs repeat over and over again, which makes it great for differentiation and identification. On the other hand, you’re not going to watch a scene from a TV show 10 times to practice your differentiation identification. And so for that reason, TV is best for practicing understanding once you’ve gotten much better with differentiation and identification. And so the biggest time sync I see learners do is spend hours watching TV. Okay? There’s no bigger waste of time than that. With that being said, obviously anything is better than nothing. So if you’re going to watch TV, then I recommend YouTube. First off, because you’ll be getting conversational Chinese as opposed to scripted or kind of like that kind of stuff. Second, the video is a lot more short and adjustable. And third, you can adjust playback speed. Okay, so now I’ll give you some content I recommend according to what I call the listening hierarchy. And this is important because you shouldn’t watch native speakers, certain ones at least. What do I mean by that? Well, not every Mandarin speaker holds an equal weight in terms of how easy they are to understand. And so we need to keep that in mind when looking for material to practice our listening. See, it’s easier for an English learner to understand a Caucasian grandma than it is for them to understand some Gen Z kid, right? They talk slower, they don’t say clearer, and they have less slang, right? We know how grandmas talk, right? In Chinese, it’s actually the reverse. The grandma in Chinese is actually the hardest to understand. When you’re listening to Mandarin, especially older people, there may be words mixed in that aren’t Mandarin. Old people in China don’t always have Mandarin as their first language, and they frequently mix in whatever their first language is in with it. For instance, like Shanghai, Donbea, or whatever. Or there’s a good chance that they might not even be speaking Mandarin. That’s why I always say differentiating is so key because sometimes you’re punishing yourself for not understanding when they’re not even speaking Mandarin in the first place. And so whenever you can listen to young speakers who enunciate better and also will typically speak in pure Mandarin because unfortunately you know in China like uh young people speak less and less of their native dialect versus you know Mandarin. It’s just how it is. This is my listening hierarchy from my experience of traveling the world and consuming over 10,000 hours of Chinese stuff on my own personal learning journey. Remember at the easiest stage, meaning like content that is more like easy to understand, you’re focusing more on differentiation and identification. Then as you get harder, meaning like content that is generally harder to understand, you’re going to focus more on understanding because you’ve already mastered hopefully differentiation and edification with the easier stuff. Cool. So from easiest to hardest to practice with. easiest. Okay, start with watching foreigners and ABCs. Okay, they speak slow. They annunciate clearly typically and they introduce English at hard words. And there’s English subs, which is great for learners and people who are new to the language. Okay, so here’s some YouTubers. For foreigners, I actually recommend this guy. His name is Afu. He’s a he’s a German guy in China. He’s he just like the way he talks is very easy to understand. He understands everything very clearly, and I think he’s great for practice. Plus, he has English subs, too. Now, for ABC’s, I mean, I’m I mean, I’m going to recommend myself. I mean, Kanto Mando is the obvious choice. By the way, this channel is called Kanto 2 Mando, but we actually have a main channel called Kantomando where we focus on like sharing Chinese culture, but not Chinese language specifically. But on that channel, we have a lot of videos where we used to struggle with Chinese. And it’s cool because you’ll see like I’m not kidding when I say I was in your shoes. Like, I was actually dog trash at both Cantonese and Mandarin. There’s a video we have called the drawing challenge. That’s probably one of the funniest videos we’ve ever put out as a channel. I think that could be good for listening practice. Okay, we have an entire playlist of just like Chinese challenges from when we used used to be really bad at Chinese. I’m telling you now, my Chinese was trash, but that’s what makes it good practice. At the same time though, if you don’t want to watch more of me, just look up 24 hours speaking Chinese only challenges on YouTube, and there’s tons of ABCs doing that, and those are typically great for practicing. Then we got level two difficulty and now we get into kind of like other Chinese speaking regions and now we have Malaysia and Singapore. So this is level two because they’ll typically, you know, introduce more English and also speak in a more booklike way than people from other parts of the Chinese speaking world. For example, there’s a channel called 3P is pretty good. I remember when I first saw them, they kind of reminded me of Kentomando but Malaysian. There’s a Singaporean channel called Tiff with Me and they’re actually pretty good too. They introduce English as well as Mandarin, so that’s good for practice. So, I’d recommend at level two practicing with Singaporeans and Malaysians. Okay? Once you get past the ABCs, practice with Singaporeans and Malaysians. Once you finish that, we get into people who are like from pure Mandarin speaking parts. Okay? And next, we have Taiwan. The Taiwanese accent is actually known to be a bit slower and not as fast. There’s some slight accent differences between Taiwan and mainland China, but for differentiation and identification, Taiwanese programming is great because they genuinely don’t speak as fast in general. On top of that, a Taiwanese accent actually eliminates the neutral tone, which is really prevalent in the mainland, which also helps a lot with the whole d I do the whole process. I actually have an entire video where I actually break down why Taiwanese manin is easier to learn. And so, if you’re curious about that, you can check out the video. Okay? But basically, it comes down to, for example, like in Taiwan, they might say very clearly, right? And also both terms have the tone pronounced. Whereas in mainland China they say very fast and the second one has a neutral tone which makes it harder for your ear to catch it when you’re first starting off. It sounds like one word altogether as opposed to which is how they say it in Taiwan because they don’t use the neutral tone as commonly. Channel Rex. I mean this guy J Chen does three interviews and he has English subs. The audio quality is decent most of the time which is a pretty good listening practice. He also has foreigners on his videos that speak Mandarin, which is also great for practice. And then um there’s no Chinese YouTuber I like. Her name is Gin. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have English subs, but she nunates very clearly and her videos are a lot of fun. Um at this point anyway, if you’re trying to like if you’re listening to Taiwanese like YouTubers, you should be practicing your understanding as opposed to focusing on differentiation and identification anyway. Then finally, we get to the hardest level, which is level four and five, the mainland. Okay, the biggest problem with the mainland is a large variety of accents and also the fact that not everyone is speaking Mandarin sometimes. And so that’s why generally anything from the mainland China is harder and so treat it as more advanced listening practice. Even then there’s still hierarchy, right? Southerners in general, these people from southern China like Shanghai, Sichuan, whatever, they basically have a very similar southern accent to people from Taiwan, but now you introduce more like mainland terminology and slang. They’re not that much harder than people from Taiwan. The only difference really is going to be in the fact that, you know, their videos might have, you know, other people from the mainland who, you know, have crazy accents you never heard of, right? Or they might have people from the mainland who are speaking a completely different language that you don’t even know if it’s manned or not. With that being said, here are some examples of YouTubers I like. I like Soius. Um, I used to watch a lot of this YouTuber called Kevin in Shanghai, but now he stopped uploading, but he was he has a lot of interesting videos. And I like I really like street interview channels mainland China. And so there’s one called And that one has uh that one has pretty good content. Finally, we get to northerners. Northerners are the hardest. Not just because of the fact that they add the eer sound to the end of everything, but also they tend to speak faster and they also tend to slur their words together. So save listening to northern like Mandarin for after you’ve gotten comfortable with all the levels below. Okay. I generally don’t watch any like pure northerner YouTubers, so I don’t have a specific one to recommend, but I like Treeman. They do film some content in the north sometimes, and it’s it’s pretty good. With that being said, there we go. I hope that was helpful. If there’s one take away from this video, it’s the DIU framework and making sure you tackle the right problem and know where you’re struggling. Okay? The worst thing you can do is tackle like you struggle listening and you’ll be like, “Oh, I need to learn more words.” But that’s not going to help you. Your issue is differentiation and identification. And that’s almost everyone’s issue. So, I hope that’s helpful. And if it was, remember to subscribe. And now, click here if you’re a Cantonese speaker who wants to learn Mandarin. And click here for a video that YouTube thinks you’ll love. Till next time.