Please do not block "using the website" until someone gives you access to the microphone. Simply make the parts of the page that rely on the microphone not work, and make it obvious they won't work until people give access to the devices you need access to.
And in the mean time let them browse the page as normal, instead of force-hiding the content scroll bar and presenting a full screen overlay modal. If your page explains what it's for, locking people out of that content just because they don't trust you yet is intentionally crippling the experience for no good reason.
Thanks for the feedback! We didn't realise this would pose such a problem. We've updated the website so it asks for microphone permission after people press the 'Record' button.
Thank you, that's the perfect solution. Although you probably want to offer people a way to dismiss that modal, too: it's still "waiting" for permission rather than being able to go "wait this is not what I wanted to do how do I get back to the site".
From experience of trying to converse with actual fluent speakers of Mandarin, there is a huge gap going from what you learn in the classroom, where you practise the tones in slow-mo, and how people speak and listen in reality.
IMO there's no replacement for hardcore practise here - at the end of the day it is most like a physical skill so the learning tools you use for practising an instrument or sports technique are going to serve you well.
Focus on shortening the tones you sound (while staying accurate) and focus on combining tones.
Thankfully there are only 4 tones so only 16 unique combinations of two tones (actually only 15 because 3->3 isn't really used)
And only 64 combinations of 3 tones
If you master those combinations in terms of speed and accuracy (both speaking and listening) the rest of it can be composed.
Then begins the long path to memorizing every phoneme+tone -> character pairing :)
Listening comprehension, IMHO is the last skill to develop in learning a foreign language.
The reason is that it's "all or nothing". You either know and recognize all of the words in a sentence, or you can't cope with the sentence at all.
The first phase of language learning is mostly theory. Mostly vocabulary and grammar. The second phase is mostly reading, reinforcing the theory, forming a good understanding of how the language is used. Additionally writing things, chatting and the like. Third phase is immersion with speaking and listening.
Those phases overlap, of course, but in my opinion that's the overall process. I've used it successfully for English and Spanish (though I haven't completed phase 3 in Spanish yet). In Mandarin I'm currently struggling towards mastering HSK 4 vocabulary, though relatively advanced.
> Listening comprehension, IMHO is the last skill to develop in learning a foreign language. [...] The first phase of language learning is mostly theory. Mostly vocabulary and grammar. The second phase is mostly reading, reinforcing the theory, forming a good understanding of how the language is used. Additionally writing things, chatting and the like. Third phase is immersion with speaking and listening.
To clarify: This is the way skills develop when people extensively study but barely learn a foreign language, the way typically happens in classrooms. It is a cruel method with poor results.
All of the actual learning of the language per se happens from listening to (or reading) comprehensible input, which should start from day 1 (yes this takes considerable effort for teachers to implement). Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time. Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.
Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time.
I am far more competent in written Japanese than spoken, both reading and writing it, essentially through understanding grammar. "Total waste of time" seems a harsh appraisal.
If you take two novices and dump one into arbitrarily extensive grammar lessons for 2 years, and the other into spending a couple hours per day listening (i.e. actively focusing attention on trying to understand what is being said) to the language for 2 years, at the end the first person won’t speak the language and the second person will.
The first person is going to learn something, but it’s not an efficient use of their time if the goal is language fluency.
If you want to learn to read, then by far the most effective use of time is to practice reading, with whatever minimal bootstrapping is necessary up front to start reading very basic material.
This is not just speculation. There has been a ton of scholarly research on this topic.
>spending a couple hours per day listening [...] to the language for 2 years, at the end the first person won’t speak the language and the second person will.
It doesn’t work like that. For the student to make any progress he need to be able to understand most of the things in the speech (this is called comprehensible input, and the theory is both applicable to listening and reading). That’s why there are people living in foreign country for years yet cannot speak or understand the language at all.
Also it’s kinda stupid to say that language learning must be either grammar/voc learning or listening: it needs to be both. Classes are needed because they make portion of listening material comprehensible, which is impossible by listening only.
with whatever minimal bootstrapping is necessary up front to start reading very basic material
That's how I started reading. Basic grammar, and some vocab. Vocab I didn't know was simple to look up; grammar I didn't know rendered the entire sentence incomprehensible and looking up the individual words did very little to help. If I knew the grammar but not the vocab, thirty seconds to comprehension. If I knew the vocab but not the grammar, order of magnitude more time to understand, often requiring assistance from someone else. Knowing the grammar felt like doing it on easy mode.
Not knowing the grammar rendered it a waste of time. THAT was the "total waste of time".
It was basically how it worked. "Here is some more reading to do, in order to comprehend it, here is some grammar that you will need." Literally front-loaded. My experience of effective learning is basically the complete opposite of what you advocated; no front-loading of grammar rendered it extraordinarily inefficient.
I dread to think how long even the basic sentence structure of "topic - comment" in Japanese would have taken me to realise if I'd had to learn it by just listening to people use it; like I'm meant to be some kind of linguistic detective. Telling me that before hearing the sentence spoken rendered it SO much more understandable, right from the start. I was able to start making valid, meaningful sentences in Japanese within sixty seconds. Topic - comment. Here's some nouns, here are some words that are like adjectives, here's how you mark the "topic" which you could think of as similar to the "subject" in English grammar, but go easy on that because the grammar is different, here's the copula, off you go.
Great work, that was a nice sixty seconds of comprehensible and correct Japanese, none of which you had ever heard before - you constructed it all yourself. Pretty good for someone who's been studying the language less than ten minutes. Here's the copula in the past tense, off you go with that.
My God, I genuinely flinch to think about how long that would have taken me without any front-loading of grammar. If I was meant to just guess how the language worked based on listening to it. What a waste of time that would be.
I reckon someone could listen to Japanese for a very long time before realising that some of the things that are kind of like adjectives can change depending on tense, but for some of them the copula changes. A native English speaker would have to really be good to spot that quickly. What a waste of time that would be compared to simply learning that piece of grammar.
I self-studied Chinese mostly using Skritter (skritter.com) for spaced repetition of vocabulary and found it effective. The problem with learning via listening is the availability of suitable material.
I estimate you need around 20k of common words, characters and phrases for understanding a large variety of vocabulary for everyday use (e.g. watching television, reading newspapers, daily conversation, business discussions, books, songs, poetry, etc.). This takes a considerable amount of time to commit to memory, so doing it efficiently is important - at 2000 hours a year, this is two years of memorising 5 items an hour, which is ambitious. While learning, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the same word might be used in different ways in different contexts.
I agree grammar is relatively irrelevant from a wider perspective - there's just not that much of it compared to vocabulary, and an intuitive understanding is fine for the most part. However it is also typically taught at a beginner level with basic vocabulary and varied sentence structures, which are useful in themselves (not "a total waste of time"). Understanding the terminology also makes using reference materials easier in some cases.
In practical terms then, carefully graded tuition and listening practice might be the ideal, but in practice this is an expensive route for most people when you are looking at two years of full-time learning. Realistically drilling vocabulary will get you a long way towards understanding native materials (e.g. movies with subtitles), and allows you to self-study by looking up definitions in the native language. It also allows this to happen relatively cheaply, as you can study yourself.
You're not going to get to fluency without a wide vocabulary, and from a vocab / time unit level, drilling vocab is not a bad way to get there.
> Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time.
I completely disagree, partly because studying grammar is an effective shortcut to making input more comprehensible. If I memorise the verb conjugations for Spanish verbs, for example, I now understand more information about every sentence (e.g. omitted verb subjects and tense/mood information). It will still be necessary to listen and read extensively in order to internalise the formation and meaning of the verb forms, but it skips a lengthy process of reverse engineering. Ditto for producing your own sentences, which I think is also fundamentally important for learning a language.
> Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.
This is absolutely true; when using flashcards or spaced repetition, it is vastly better to have a full sentence with the target word blanked out compared to only having the definition.
One problem with comprehensible input methods (like what Rosetta Stone does?) is that it can be extremely boring as an adult and ultimately demotivating.
Studying grammar can be fun - and it feels like an accomplishment to be able to say some pretty complex things in Chinese.
Sure my listening isn't that great.. but on the other hand being limited to a two year old's conversation ability isn't particularly enticing.
Also, fwiw, reading and listening is a way different skill... Thanks to the ability to rewind when reading
In my opinion it takes years to be able to comprehend random sentences uttered by native speakers, in pretty much any language. It just takes a brain that amount of time to short-cut and organize all the information in an efficient enough manner.
>Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time. Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.
Self studied Japanese to fluency that way. AJATT method but largely concentrated on front loading all the grammar in 4 months then built 10k vocab over the following year. Worked like an absolute charm.
I've heard the idea that somehow "front-loading" doesn't work. For one thing, it does. I have done it, repeatedly. I have rarely heard people have success without devoting a lot of time on "front-loading".
You have to learn the grammar rules somehow. If you want to do it through assimilation, as supposed to somebody telling you how it works, well, that's possible but takes a lot longer and is more error prone.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do "output" exercises. I'm just saying that in order to learn information, you better receive it somehow. And you can receive that information either in an orderly fashion ("front-loading") or in a random incomplete fashion. You can't guess your way through language learning.
That doesn't really pass the smell test for me. Even native speakers of a language in its native country are explicitly taught grammar and vocabulary in school. I could believe the Wikipedia article's weaker claim, that there's an extra step between instinctively remembering "了 is the perfective particle" and being fluent in the perfective aspect. But the idea that explicit instruction is useless, that consciously knowing grammar won't help you acquire it at all, seems obviously wrong.
> Even native speakers of a language in its native country are explicitly taught grammar and vocabulary in school
It is not that there’s no value whatsoever in formal study of grammar. It might come in handy if you want to be a linguist, an editor, a high-level writer, a lawyer, or the like. If students want to take a grammar course in high school or college that seems okay with me.
It just doesn’t teach basic language fluency.
Native speakers don’t start studying grammar until they have had 10+ years of full-time experience with the language. And anecdotally, the students who spend a lot of time reading independently don’t really need the grammar lessons (they already have a subconscious understanding of what is or isn’t grammatical, and the typical school grammar lesson is very slow and obvious for them), and the students who don’t spend any time reading independently and regularly speaking with educated adults would get more value out of instead spending the time reading or listening to someone read. YMMV.
> Native speakers don’t start studying grammar until they have had 10+ years of full-time experience with the language.
Untrue; formal grammar instruction begins not later than first grade in many curricula, which is age 6-7, which would require using the language several years before birth to reach 10+ years prior use. Native speakers begin studying grammar about as soon as they have the intellectual capacity to comprehend the concepts associated with grammar.
But I don't follow the basic assumption that the way native speakers become fluent is particularly effective. No matter how much explicit instruction helps, native speakers couldn't learn basic fluency that way, because there's no way to deliver explicit instruction to a baby.
Grammar for learning a second language is helpful. Helps you to understand how to map what you want to say, and what you heard/read.
That said, brute force practice work reeeeally well for language. And naturally people will build a kind of internal grammar anyway. But knowing what is what can help with that too.
I think the statement was just phrased too strongly. The proposition isn’t that one shouldn’t study grammar at all, but rather that one shouldn’t front-load grammar and theory too much.
Speaking from experience, I gained basic conversational fluency in Spanish from English in a few months by spending a ton of time with LingQ (essentially reading and listening to untranslated passages and creating digital flash cards), obsessively practicing pronunciation, and listening to lyrics in Spanish music for hours on end. I focused on grammar to the extent that I had to, but no more than that. For instance, I learned only those conjugations I actually needed for simple speech. I compiled the ones I needed to study based on what I actually encountered in real passages.
Now, by no means did that render me fully fluent in the language. But, case in point, I took two years of Spanish instruction in school with lots of grammar front-loaded and I gained more or less no speaking or listening ability at all. For me there was a dramatic difference in efficiency between the two approaches to language learning.
>Listening comprehension, IMHO is the last skill to develop in learning a foreign language.
The reason is that it's "all or nothing". You either know and recognize all of the words in a sentence, or you can't cope with the sentence at all
So not true. Maybe depends on the way you study but I focus on listening skills hardcore early on. It's what helps build the natural accent. It's definitely not all or nothing. There are islands of understanding. They tend to grow and grow. It starts out with single words, then grows to two words together then grows to partial sentences and then to full sentences among a paragraph. So on and so forth.
We may not have the same definition of listening comprehension.
When I start learning a new language, I can totally "listen comprehend" stuff that's close to the material I already studied. But the same isn't true for random content at realistic speed.
And the "island" part is compatible with "all or nothing". Because yes, within those islands, you understand everything, and over time, as your proficiency in the language grows, there are more islands of knowing all the words. But it seems to be a lot easier at first to get told what a word means and how it is used, rather than depending on it to appear in a useful context a couple hundred times.
You do both at the same time if you want the fastest results. You get structured i+1 input that you can cope with for part of your learning and then you dive deep into the the native content and let your brain compute the statistics necessary to eventually be able to recognize the patterns at natural speed.
My definition is of listening comprehension is any information I can glean from listening. Information being a reduction in uncertainty. Doesn't need to be complete. Progress is directional.
I know my language learning algorithm well and I pound it on repeat until my goal is achieved.
Hm, I'd say the Pimsleur method is quite good at teaching every-day language. Which is a worthwhile task, but the range of words is quite limited.
I would suspect that in order to get up to HSK4 or even HSK5, just the audio portions of course, you'd need like double or triple the amount of lessons, which would be impractical.
Of course, most people will start speakind and listening, in various forms, in phase 1 and 2. And that is actually necessary. But I think you won't be able to really grok "random" speech before having a good grasp at pretty much all the vocabulary you would encounter.
The range of words you learn with Pimsleur is limited because the method makes sure you actually retain every word it tries to teach you. Having a solid grasp of a small vocabulary (a few hundred words) is an excellent way to start off with a language.
> But I think you won't be able to really grok "random" speech before having a good grasp at pretty much all the vocabulary you would encounter.
But you will be able to grok small conversations about subjects you're familiar with. You can expand from there. When you try to learn a new language, you should be speaking from day one, no matter how limited the range of subjects you can speak about.
> I would suspect that in order to get up to HSK4 or even HSK5, just the audio portions of course, you'd need like double or triple the amount of lessons, which would be impractical.
I have passed HSK4.
I am not competent in Mandarin listening comprehension, or in speaking (to be fair, speaking isn't a part of the test). Those skills aren't necessary to pass. The audio samples for HSK4 are a lot more generous with you than actual speech is.
I would agree that Pimsleur lessons won't take you to HSK4/5, but they are a great way to get into the language first without all the more academic studies upfront.
There is a huge asymmetry between learning to recognize characters and learning to write them. I've found that learning to read a basic repertoire of Chinese characters is surprisingly doable and a very helpful skill as a learner, to the point where I quickly found it easier to decipher the subtitles than to understand the audio when watching even children's movies. So, to answer your question, yes: it's practical, and a good idea.
Writing, on the other hand, requires truly knowing each character, every little stroke in the right place. Totally different beast. It takes many years to master and constant practice to keep up (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia).
I think it's necessary. At least my strategy is to memorize the characters and words first. I've used "decipher chinese" to read simple texts, and that is also a great method.
The thing about reading is that it is the fastest way to review and reinforce vocabulary and grammar.
You can read at your own pace and look up anything. You can't do it that easily when listening, speaking or writing. And with a certain minimum level of theory under your belt, reading will be faster than spaced repetition of vocabulary you mostly know already.
Of course, there are different levels of proficiency in Chinese you might want to achieve. If you want to be able to interact while traveling, you wouldn't need the full complement of HSK Level 4.
However, if you want to have more interesting conversations or you want to understand technical texts...
As a bit of an introvert I learned to read and type Mandarin before speaking. Just didn't talk to people, but absorbed what I saw in the cities I lived in. Reading menus led to signs led to comics led to books. In fact, my reading is still better than my speaking or listening skills.
Have you found much rewarding Chinese content? In terms of tv shows they don’t bother translating for the west and books/literature?
I feel like there are so many great books in English where it probably wouldn’t provide much value to fully commit. But I’m a big fan of China and Chinese. I even watched a stupid Chinese soap opera about rural people moving to Shanghai and was totally fascinated by the lifestyle and growth of the city. But only a few episodes were translated. It was called something like Narrows or living in small quarters.
I've just started learning Mandarin and would say that the characters have been easier than I've expected. Within a week of starting, I could read a dozen characters from Mandarin-language packaging of food items. Learning the characters at the same time as the sounds for words seems to take about the same amount of time as just the sounds for me. And recognizing the characters is easier than recognizing syllables from audio unless the speaker is intentionally speaking clearly and slowly.
> he first phase of language learning is mostly theory. Mostly vocabulary and grammar. The second phase is mostly reading, reinforcing the theory, forming a good understanding of how the language is used. Additionally writing things, chatting and the like. Third phase is immersion with speaking and listening.
This is an excellent description of the process I used to learn to speak 3 foreign languages to a level of professional fluency, and 3 others to conversational fluency (this was in my 20s, I now only maintain fluency in 2 languages, although sure I could regain it fairly quickly).
I do think this depends on the individual. Some people successfully use other techniques.
I don't think it depends on the individual, but rather on goals.
If you want to speak a language in a useful but relatively broken way, as fast as possible (for example as a refugee), you might want to prioritize a smaller amount of theory and more practice early on. But that would actually prolong the time to proficiency.
My experience has been that listening is basically a way to learn the language with a minimum of effort. Context and non-verbal communication often make it clear what many unknown words in a sentence mean, making it not only possible to understand speech far above one's vocabulary level, but to actually to increase one's vocabulary through listening. These non-verbal cues and context are mostly absent in written texts.
Your method also seems counter intuitive as children learn languages primarily through listening, as they are for the most part illiterate.
"Children" take almost 20 years to learn English at high proficiency.
And the context stuff doesn't work for me in audio, not until years into a language. It might be easier with a language close to my native, but otherwise...
In my experience I can have studied a language for a period of time and still only understand gibberish when confronted with truly random sentences by natives.
Your example isn't really random. You already seem to recognize the pattern. But there are a LOT of patterns.
> Listening comprehension, IMHO is the last skill to develop in learning a foreign language.
Completely backwards, in my experience. Start with simple audiobooks, listen to them a million times, and you will be amazed by how much comprehension and speaking ability it gives you
Sounds interesting. I've been trying to use movies (something called "substudy"* which converts subtitled movies to a csv file which I then import them as cards into anki), but I find it very difficult.
Could you point me in the direction of some of these simple audio books?
The problem with movies (and TV), I find, is that it is fewer words per minute than a book. Though availability of English language television seems to be a great aid for ESL learners, so it's not wasted time at all.
Conversation practice with a native speaker is probably the ideal, but audiobooks are cheap and available. You can get around the disadvantage of not having a native trying to make themselves understood to you, by using an audiobook that you know well in translation. So I find that knowing the book well in my native language (or another language I know) is the most important initial requirement. Beyond that, it should be in simple language, though not boring. Maybe middle school or high school reading level.
On the first listen of chapter one, I find, I don't pick up more than the characters' names. After one or two dozen listens of chapter one, and I can follow the plot along pretty well (if it's a book I know), and can pick up words from context, and can start listening to the whole book.
Audio versions of the Bible are available in every language, and can be used as a first/last resort, depending on interest. If you can't find an audiobook Bible from the normal web apps, the Jehovah's Witnesses have audio versions in an insane number of languages (translated from their sometimes peculiar English version though). I like Tolkien, which is at about the right level, has audiobooks in many languages, and is familiar to me.
Grammar comes in very slowly using this method, and can use some augmentation using traditional methods. Pronunciation and comprehension, however, are supercharged.
Ok, but what is your exact technique? Do you periodically pause the tape so you can follow along with it using the book in written form? Or just plain listen?
Also, are you studying Chinese this way or a language more similar to English? With all the different grammar and word order in Chinese, I can't see how I could pick up the meaning without some reference, unless I was extremely familiar with the material.
Edit: Also because there are vocal sounds in English that aren't pronouncable in Chinese, even character names are not the same. “Gandalf” becomes “gan dow foo”, for instance
> Focus on shortening the tones you sound (while staying accurate) and focus on combining tones.
I think this is good advice. When I first started learning mandarin, I really emphasised the tones, I guess because my untrained ear found it difficult to distinguish between them, and also because I thought people might understand me better.
But the first time I went to China, it was immediately obvious that people had a hard time understanding my (then rudimentary) mandarin, which I believe was in large part because of the over-exaggerated way I was using tones.
In the 3 weeks I spent in China, my understanding and usage of the tones came on tremendously - way more than it ever could have if I wasn't immersion in the language. Your ear does need to kind of train before you hear and understand tones at a more intuitive level.
To anyone learning Chinese, my advice would be to get yourself out there, even if it's just for a short time.
I built a little tool to help with tone pairs. There are vocab sets to explore all the combinations and a listening exercise. There is a huge jump from knowing the 4 tones from a pinyin chart and listening to full sentences. Learning the flavor of the 16 (19?) combinations is a great stepping stone.
I came to say this as well. Especially the third tone, I think is misrepresented in many texts and classes incorrectly. It's taught as a "down then back up" but in real, normal speed conversation, just sounds like a slightly lower pitch. Unless of course you have certain combinations like two third tones in a row.
I'd like to add that moving from sterile classroom Mandarin to irl Mandarin, you'll notice that
1. You may realize that the tones are realized differently in a variety of ways depending on context, speaker, etc.
2. Just as you can parse a different accent, native speakers can still figure out what you're trying to say if your tones are slightly whack. After all, tonal information in Mandarin is lost when sung.
I remember the same thing. The tones can be picked up relatively easily when practicing with actual Mandarin speakers. There becomes a "in-use" memory that's easier to recall than trying to remember all those tone strokes.
I haven't had real-life experience, but I experienced a similar effect from vocabulary drilling in Duolingo and Skritter. Those have audio, and it tends to help with the memorizing.
I guess you're right - I don't know if emphasis placed on this has changed over the years but the neutral tone was always a bit of an after thought/edge case when I was taught.
Though I also wouldn't really consider my formal Mandarin education to be particularly rigorous or thorough...
I'm a native mandarin speaker but the website said I failed 9/10 questions. I guess it's the accent problem as there are hundreds of different mandarin accents across eastern Asia
My strategy so far has been to take intensive classes with a private teacher (a professional from a language school), 2h every day I'm in town. Each course is 20 classes (i.e. 40h), and after 10 courses you're supposed to be reasonably conversational. Because I only take classes when I'm not out of town, and I'm constantly traveling, I've completed about 3 levels in 6 months.
I've decided to focus purely on conversational mandarin, and skip learning Hanzi (characters) entirely. So far, tones is the part I have the biggest trouble with. I'm told I'm alright (i.e. a lot of people are much worse), but I still feel entirely inadequate. I often remember vocabulary without the tone. I also have a ton of difficultly distinguishing tones when listening to spoken mandarin and only distinguish them based on context. That triggers some stupid mistakes like not knowing whether I heard mǎi (buy) or mài (sell), which have exact opposite meaning but sound the same to me unless I'm listening extra carefully. Whereas I can easily distinguish shì (to be, to try) and shí (ten) based on context.
I feel, however, like I'm finally reaching a level of being able to communicate in a useful way outside of my classes. I've used mandarin for basic things in China and Taiwan (e.g. restaurants), and have mostly used it to talk to people when going out.
There's something quite amazing about learning something new (really the first time I've endeavored something this big and different since college), and I feel like this'll be one that will pay serious dividends over time.
Tones just clicked for me one day — I could hear them distinctly in both people who were speaking to me and when I was speaking (it hurt my ear to be able to hear all of my tonal mistakes).
The key to mastering tones (actually all of the spoken language of any language) is to listen more. Receptive skills like listening develop before productive skills like speaking.
In order to supplement your tutoring, I suggest you listen to a lot of Mandarin while you away from the tutor, especially when you are on the road. Specifically, I recommend TV shows, radio shows, or podcasts that are aimed at younger people (maybe 8-20 — younger than that has some strange kiddie terms, and older usually gets you full on adult language). Language targeted to young people usually has a relatively narrow set of vocabulary, and it usually avoids complicated words (e.g., like Latin-based words in English) and idiomatic phrases (e.g., four character combos).
Even if you don’t understand much or even any of what you hear, you will start to develop an intuitive feel for how the language sounds. Once your vocabulary develops, you will start picking up phrases, then sentences, then entire paragraphs. Somewhere in that journey, your ear will (most likely) develop to a point that you can not only hear other people’s tones, but you will naturally hear your tones as well (at least when they don’t sound right).
>Specifically, I recommend TV shows, radio shows, or podcasts that are aimed at younger people (maybe 8-20 — younger than that has some strange kiddie terms, and older usually gets you full on adult language).
Do you have any specific shows or podcasts to recommend?
I haven’t looked at that specific space in a long time, but what I did then was to do an online search for what Chinese/Taiwanese teens were listening to or watching. It helps if you can do this in Chinese and if you localize your search results properly so that the search does not focus on results from your home country.
Doing a quick test, the Slow Chinese podcast may be a good start.
> I've decided to focus purely on conversational mandarin, and skip learning Hanzi (characters) entirely
I initially did the same, but for curious and started learning a few characters too. It actually proved to be beneficial to my speaking too, as the characters provided a kind of visual mnemonic in a way I hadn't expected, helping me to remember sounds and tones.
And of course when actually in China, it's really beneficial to be able to read a menu, or at least have an idea of what you're ordering!
Absolutely do what works for you, but I'd suggest trying a few to see if you get the same kind of "visual reminder" benefit I did.
Then you didn't really remember the vocabulary, did you? It's critical to remember the tone along with the words. I know it feels like you "almost" got it, but if you don't remember the tone then you should treat it as not remembering the word at all, IMO.
FWIW, what helped me was doing a little finger gesture in the air with the syllable, sort of tracing the pinyin tone marker. Then when I talk I'm sort of habitually waving my finger down out of sight, but at least I'm producing the sounds correctly. Basically, treat learning vocabulary as learning {syllable, tone} tuples, rather than trying to learn a syllable with a built-in tone.
Based on my experience learning Japanese I'd say this is the perfect approach. In the early days, people should stay away from the written side of a language.
As someone not in China but interested in learning, I'd prefer to try to understand what I'm hearing before working on tonal pronounciation. This is why I'd love and pay good money for a dataset of engaging Chinese tv shows, etc with the English translation and the Hanyu Pinyin displayed simultaneously and perfectly synchronized to what's being spoken on the screen. For me, listening comprehension is everything.
As someone who has learned Japanese and is currently going through Mandarin : the written stuff is super useful in the mid term. It’s the equivalent to learning Latin and Greek roots for English. It’s a vocabulary multiplier and let’s you find words yourself even when you hear them for the first time.
It might feel like an uphill battle but it helps a lot imo
>I've decided to focus purely on conversational mandarin, and skip learning Hanzi (characters) entirely.
I studied Mandarin formally a little while ago up to HSK 2/3 level, at a reputable university based on a weekly 3 hour lesson. Although not comparable to your experience, I can relate to your approach.
On the course, we were encouraged to concentrate as much on the conversational side as reading simplified/traditional texts, mostly assisted via Pinyin. The only resources available to us were a well stocked library. It took so much longer and proved to be an incredibly frustrating experience at times, especially when desperately trying to find native speakers to converse with or decipher even the most basic of texts. As a lapsed 'student' I feel it was all worth it in the end, despite only retaining 10% of everything I learned, at least the knowledge can be justified as well rounded.
The other resources I leaned upon for assistance consisted of TV, news, movies, meetup and various language courses, which were no substitute for real interaction with native speakers. Wenlin and Plecodict were a godsend, when you did not want to consult a physical dictionary. Amongst others, the forum below sparked more interest in the wider aspects of the language and culture.
Hanzi are something you can learn on your own time outside of class. It’s really not a good idea to skip them at all. As someone who’s also learning Chinese, hanzi make remembering what I learned easier, since you can see how lots of vocabulary that you learn consists of parts of other concepts synthesized together.
Plus you have loads of homophones, and thinking of which hanzi each word is using makes it far easier to know what you’re talking about.
Example: shí. It means 10. It also means time, as well as dozens of other things. I can’t imagine trying to mentally divide all the overlapping words without the visual assistance of different hanzi when reading. It’d be like trying to learn the differences between they’re/their/there in English as a second language without looking at the spelling differences. It makes it harder.
I'm incapable of self-teaching a language. I need the external motivation from a set schedule, and the interaction with another human to keep me progressing.
I moved to Hong Kong this year from San Francisco to do these classes (and because I wanted to make the move). HK speaks Cantonese, so it's not full immersion. But you're a lot closer to China here and there's a decent amount of Mandarin around. The best thing to do would be to move to the mainland, but I'm not quite ready for that yet.
This is going to sound ridiculous, but every class my teacher and I basically spend the first hour (before getting into the official material) just chatting about life. A lot of it is about mundane topics (travel, food, what we did in the previous day, my adventures hitting on girls, etc.). We do it all in Chinese. She helps me by adding to my vocabulary as I try to express these things in Chinese. She adds new vocabulary constantly to this as well, waiting for me to get confused and prompt her about it. These conversation are the most helpful part of the class. They're natural and real. They hit topics I'd use in real life daily. They also involve natural repetition helping me naturally add the vocabulary and grammar to my repertoire.
> I’ve tried this approach but it’s impossible to find a tutor in SF :/
I’m really surprised by this — Chinese is everywhere in the Bay Area.
Suggestions:
1. Contact the Chinese department at a local university (e.g., USF) and ask a professor there. They will know tons.
2. Go to any cram school with marketing aimed at Chinese kids (Maybe something like Kumon. There are cram school ads in Chinese everywhere) and ask if they know someone. There are a lot of folks who teach Chinese to heritage speakers of Chinese (i.e., folks who speak it in the home but have not learned it formally). The teaching technique is a little different, but you can probably find someone who has taught non-heritage speakers if you specifically ask for it.
Sign up for lessons online at italki.com! I've only used it to do language exchange, but they have a bunch of teachers there who teach via Skype, and you'll probably pay less than what you would for a local teacher.
1. In both listening and production, differentiate between volume and pitch changes.
2. Tones have pitch contours. They're not just sudden changes from low to high etc. They are continuous changes in pitch over time. Try to visualize or feel the pitch curve (e.g. by using this type of tool).
3. Pay attention to the starting and ending pitches.
4. Don't overly connect syllables together. We tend to do this in English, but in Chinese, most syllables (characters) should not have a constant flow of air connecting them.
5. People usually mess up 3-2 combinations because they connect the third tone's low tone to the beginning of the second tone. Actually, the second tone should start higher than the third tone ends.
6. For each tone, there is a range of acceptable tone contours! This is how Chinese speakers are still able to have sentence-level expressiveness (e.g. happy sentence vs. sad sentence). Maybe try practicing some dramatic readings.
As your vocabulary expands, you start to come across more and more of these "unlucky pairs" that can be confused for one another. Some funny stories from my learning experience include "wo3 yao4 ying4 le!" instead of "wo3 yao4 ying2 le!" and "wo3 ba4ma1 hen3 xin4 jiao1" instead of "wo3 ba4ma1 hen3 xin4jiao4". ("I'm getting hard" instead of "I'm going to win", and "my parents have sexual intercourse" instead of "my parents are religious."
Tones aren't something that people usually master overnight. In fact, almost all non-heritage learners of Chinese never learn them perfectly. And a lot of heritage learners still have accents, even if they are able to speak the correct tone numbers.
Shows like "China Bridge" (Hanyu Qiao）and "Informal Talks" (Feizhengshi Huitan) both feature non-native learners of Chinese from a variety of countries -- the first one is a speaking competition, and the the second is a roundtable talk show -- and are great for comparing yourself to other learners of Chinese. (As an interesting side note, the China Bridge show is heavily biased in favor of learners from Western countries. In my opinion, seeing those dynamics play out on tv is an important part of the Chinese learner's cultural education.)
I've kinda obsessed about my Chinese accent (本人有点声控 哈哈）, and it's still a bit aways from being native. I think it's important to remember that with English, for example, being able to speak American English doesn't mean that you can speak British English perfectly. To truly "lose" any accent takes a lot of work -- but it's definitely possible. A big part of the Broadcasting curriculum in China involves losing your regional accent so that you can speak Standard Mandarin on the air.
Sorry for the discursive thoughts, but best of luck to all Chinese learners here!
You misread. A course is 40h (20 classes), and it takes 10 courses to get reasonably conversational. i.e. 400h of class-time (not counting homework, study, and practice in the wild time)
I read the after 10 as referring to the number of classes. 400h seems a little more reasonable, albeit a lot lower than the usual estimate which has it over 1000h
If someone wants to learn how to speak chinese, the best way IMO is to repeat and mimic the sound of a native speaker over and over again. I used Glossika (glossika.com) 3 or 4 years ago when they were just selling a zip file of MP3s. So rather than trying to master individual tones out of context, you learn how to say words within a sentence context. And through space-based-repetition and daily practice, these sounds get more easily embedded and familiar with your tongue and your listening ear too. So rather than trying to memorize a bunch of tones, you're learning how all the sounds and words flow together, and that's how you learn to sound like a native speaker.
I'd also suggest Duolingo which has audio for all sentences in its course and uses speech recognition.
Additionally the Pimsleur courses are great, with non-interactive lessons you can listen to with a media player. But relatively expensive, if you want to own it legally. They also don't do characters at all, so it can only be a part of the journey.
As an alternative to Pimsleur, you can often find a login to Mango Languages at your local library's digital resources, which uses a very similar teaching methodology.
Hi, yes unfortunately at the moment the classifier can be quite inaccurate sometimes, especially if your microphone is catching some background noise. We will work on improving this.
Very interesting. Just because of the visualization I learned that my voice tends to have too much "tremolo" in the first tone and that I may be starting the third tone too low.
Other than that it seems to default to the third tone with me, even when the spectrogram doesn't look like it.
Duolingo has speech recognition for Chinese. It seems to check separate syllables, but I'm not sure how precise it judges and the feedback is lacking.
Even more interesting would be multiple syllables in a sentence. And distinguishing the consonants. In my opinion every long enough Chinese sentence is a tongue breaker because I have to switch fast between consonants that my mother language doesn't tell apart.
Helping mandarin learners practice the tones in their own time without the need for a private tutor to correct them. Record yourself speaking in-browser, and get instant feedback: pitch contour and what tone that sounded like.
Any feedback welcome!
Hi, thanks for bringing that to our attention. We will work on it. We would like to work towards giving people feedback on whole sentences. We plan to work on 2-syllable words first.
It's great to have a tool like this be available without any software installation.
I remember when I first started having Chinese lessons, my teacher used some Windows-based software to show me visualisations like these. It helped a lot to know where I was going wrong.
The visualisations here are the most useful part IMO, followed by the example sounds.
If you're a native English speaker learning Mandarin: one tip for the second tone is to make it sound like you're asking a question. In English, we raise the tone of the last syllable in a question. So if you pretend you're asking a question, you'll naturally get the right tone.
Hi, yes the classifier needs some improving. We expect that it would be much more difficult to make an accurate classifier for Cantonese, although we could make a website which presents Cantonese words/phrases and lets you see your (and the teacher's) pitch contour. Would that be of interest?
Incidentally, I'm working on a VR app for learning Mandarin. We use 360 photos of Chinese tourist locations and add interactive content to role play scenarios with your teacher (my company does mostly one-one-one instruction). You causally get to take a guided tour of a location with your teacher.
For now, is just a tool we'll be using internally, but eventually it will be expanded to many languages, have a remote class option, and have homework assignments for individual practice, all integrating into our LMS.
This is a nice idea, but I think it needs work. It classified almost every tone that I spoke as 3rd tone. Granted, I'm not native, but I speak well enough that my 4th tone couldn't possibly be interpreted as a 3rd tone.
What's the training data? Is it trained on both male and female voices? Anyways, very nice idea - I hope you pursue it and I'm looking forward to seeing how it improves over time!
I instinctively blocked access before reading the page because there was no way for me to read what the page was about before granting access -- and there still isn't, because it blocks scrolling or reading until microphone access is granted.
I use hearing aids and always have trouble discerning tones, this is my only gripe with learning chinese and it is hindering me.
I have learned english and have got rid of my thick accent by imitating how other people speak, I should be able to do that with mandarin. I can just learn the pronunciation of the characters and adapt my accent as I speak. Why is there such a stress on memorising the tone for every character?
E.g. most people will remember which syllable to stress in a word after vocalising the word, but when learning mandaring people add the tone to their flashcards and are expected to have a more direct conneciton.
The more vocabulary you learn, the more you will find similar syllables with different tones.
In general, the "standardized" language tries to avoid this problem by encouraging the use of compound words where one syllable might do. That's why pinyin without tone numbers, for example in a chat, can actually be understood quite well. But with a larger universe of potential words, for example subject specific terms, it's hard or impossible without the tones, and at some point even tones don't work and you need the characters.
Chinese is a language with very low redundancy and very high information content per phoneme. If a listener misses one phoneme, be it through noise or whatever, the chance is higher to miss all the information, as compared to, say English or Spanish, where you can often delete whole syllables or multiple letters without losing the information.
I've heard hearing aids are really bad at distinguishing frequencies and locations. I don't know why exactly, but you might want to research that subject further. You might want to choose your next hearing aid for better "Chinese performance".
The Human ear does a Fourier transformation [extremely rough explanation] by sending the sound through a helix. Along that tube, sensing hairs are triggered by different frequencies. Depending on the hearing aids, that process can be mangled up.
The analogy I've heard is that failing to distinguish between tones is like failing to distinguish between "dock" and "duck" in English. Using the wrong tone is a lot closer to saying the wrong word than saying the right word in a thick accent.
The analogy to dock/duck seems fair, but I don't see why you don't want to call that an accent. Vowel troubles of that kind are a major feature of thick accents. Staying in the Chinese context, someone saying "fourth" in a thick Mandarin accent will actually say "force". (Depending on how thick; they'll probably say something more like "four-suh".) That's not because they're saying the wrong word -- they know what fourth means; they just can't say it.
In context, this kind of thing isn't a problem because a speaker with a heavy accent applies their own sound changes in a systematic way. It's very easy, as the listener, to learn their accent and adjust to it... if they're coming out with otherwise normal speech. As a foreign language learner, you probably have a thick accent _and_ you also can't form a normal sentence, so context can't provide the support it normally would for your odd pronunciation.
(If "dock" and "duck" were actually pronounced identically, that would cause no problems, in the same way that the identical pronunciation of "bow" (archery) and "bow" (decorative knot in a ribbon) causes no problems. That's most of why it doesn't matter if someone's accent causes them to pronounce some words as other words.)
As you say, a fluent English speaker with a thick Mandarin accent will understand and often hear the distinction between "fourth" and "force". They just can't easily produce /θ/ in their own speech. If someone's flashcards said both words have the same pronunciation, even if they know it's important to "adapt your accent as you speak", I'd definitely say they're learning incorrect pronunciation.
Sure, and looking up, I think the answer to the implicit question "Why are we supposed to memorize word tone in Mandarin when we don't need to memorize word stress in English?" is "You do need to memorize word stress in English. The details are up to you, but it's not optional."
But here, what I'm really asking is:
What's the difference between "saying the wrong word" and "saying the right word in a thick accent"? In my eyes, those appear to be the same thing, so I don't see how anything could be more like one than the other.
If someone said "strawBERry", for example, I would identify that as unambiguously being the right word. There is a canonically correct stress, and native speakers will notice when you get it wrong, but I wouldn't think for a second they might be talking about some other food I didn't know the word for. Even with the words where stress does carry meaning (content, object, etc.), I would identify them as a single word where context changes the pronunciation and meaning rather than two different words that happen to be written the same way.
Ignoring the tone when learning a tonal language is equivalent to ignoring something like vowel differences or final consonants in a non-tonal language.
I wrote https://pingtype.github.io to visualise tones in pinyin, using colour and font size. It helped me learn to read Hanzi, and sing along in church, even pick up some vocabulary for listening, but I always struggled with speaking. Whenever I'd try to speak Mandarin, people would just switch to English immediately.
Tried this for awhile with my girlfriend who speaks Mandarin as her first language. It does seem to be slightly too picky, often calling my pronunciation third tongue when it should be one of the others, despite her saying it was perfectly fine to her ear. But on the other hand it called her pronunciation perfect all but one time, which seems pretty encouraging.
I'm a guy, and it called all of my tones "3rd tone" when said in my normal voice, but when I spoke in a cartoonishly high falsetto, it gave me perfect marks.
It's a good idea but (a) it doesn't actually work (tones get miscategorized as attested by the number of native speakers in comments who are having trouble) and (b) practicing words in isolation is of limited interest. The hardest part IMO comes from pronouncing sentences, which involves chaining tones correctly.
This is GREAT. I have always had an issue with tone 2 and 3 but it turns out I have this tiny dip before the rise in my tone 2. It took a while looking at the tone patterns before I worked it out. Now give me something for that stupid ü or u-umlaut and then I might actually sound ok.
That's actually fine. (I'm a native bilingual speaker, although not from PRC.)
Also, the 3rd tone is characterised more by being low than the fall-then-rise. In fast speech the rising part is often not heard; it's only really present in stressed syllables or possibly at the ends of sentences.
yu combines the tongue position of yi and the lip rounding of wu. Being able to take apart the individual components of a sound and consciously reassemble them into something different is very helpful for language learning.
If you're not sure what the components are, try reading the corresponding Wikipedia article (usually linked in the phonology section of the article about the given language): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_rounded_vowel
Doesn't work on Safari or Vivaldi on Mac OS.
After working on tones, I proudly showed them off to a Chinese friend. "Are you saying it or singing it?" he asked. It was then I realized how subtle these tones have to be for conversation.
This tool is exactly what I wanted whenever I was first learning pronunciation. I've found myself using siri to check my general pronunciation in longer sentences. This tool with segmentation would be a huge game changer.
This is incredible. As a native english speaker, tones were by far the hardest part when living in China and speaking Mandarin. Good on you for coming up with a clever way to teach this effectively, bravo.
I'm not sure it's working for tone 1. I played back the teacher's recording and it thought it was tone 3. i was able to get 2,3,4 right though, and i think it probably helped my tone2
Haha the bottom of the site says that too:
Unfortunately the system isn't very accurate at the moment, but you will quite likely be able to tell whether you are saying the right tone by looking at your vocal pitch contour and comparing it to that of the teacher.
I just use google translate on my android phone and speak out full sentences. It's pretty good as long as the sentences are long enough, have correct grammar and are common things to say.
This is fantastic, but would really love if I got realtime feedback on my main pitch as I am making it, instead of the full spectrogram 1-5 seconds later. Like a little line chart.
Doesn't work... it doesn't work
It only seems to check the frequency. The shape doesn't seem to matter, and i the shape would be correct, it classifies as incorrect
The website only works in Chrome or Opera at the moment - this may be what is causing you problems. Potentially yes - we are starting with Mandarin because it's such a popular language to learn. What other languages would you like to see?
Didn't get past the microphone permission request. What is it needed for? It could be a good idea to first warn the user that it will be requested and how it will be used.
Also, pardon a shameless plug - not sure how your app work because of the microphone permissions, but I also wrote a freely available Mandarin listening comprehension practice tool. It's pretty simple - I downloaded all zh-*.ogg files from Wiktionary, extracted tone numbers from the filenames and asked the user what they hear. You can find it hosted here:
Yeah, I admit it would be nicer if the page loaded without the request first so you could see what it's about and then request the access once you clicked the record button.
And in the mean time let them browse the page as normal, instead of force-hiding the content scroll bar and presenting a full screen overlay modal. If your page explains what it's for, locking people out of that content just because they don't trust you yet is intentionally crippling the experience for no good reason.