| Not Chinese, but I might call myself trilingual and this is exactly something that has wondered me. Language "pair": ru>de>en In very general terms, the longer you listen to a particular voice, the better you get at reconstructing the acoustically lost parts of the words. Imagine hearing low bitrate radio transmission for the first time. It's very hard to understand the words, but over time you'll get accustomed to the noise and the voice, it'll become intelligible to you. Quite literally training your neural net. It's easy for me to read/listen to RU (native). I have no problem whatsoever listening to DE, but mentally it must be more taxing to also follow the text/train of thought (beyond very short-term memory) because I notice to be swaying away more often unless remain concentrated. So it's a little harder to memorize stuff in DE or read long thoughtful texts. The walkie-talkie example from above is not arbitrary. I have experienced exactly that when learning DE and going to game servers with voice. Back then the microphones were all poor and noisy, it was much tougher to understand people. The adaptation took me about a week or two. English is very specific to me. Remember what a radar chart is? That's it, one aspect is skilled to 100% and others are closer to zero. As you can ~see~ read, my writing is doing well. Listening to cleanly recorded and spoken content such as Youtube presents no issues. As with DE, I might not follow the content very well, but I can hear and understand all of it. Movies? Oh dear, subtitles please! Not only because the voice isn't recorded in a studio (sometimes whispering, sometimes mumbling etc.) but the variety of language (vocabulary, slang) and pronunciations overload me to the point of not understanding the spoken language. Yet because my general comprehension of English is good, I'd be mostly reading subtitles to not miss anything. As it stands, I would prefer either DE or RU in movies. Years ago I had the pleasure to finally subscribe to AdoredTV on Youtube because of his content. Previously, I had skipped a video or two due to his Scottish accent. Slowly I have got used to it though. Admittedly, he had been trying to have an understandable pronunciation; some of the funny "Scottish English" videos I still can't understand. But when we had shown Adored's videos to friends, it was them who couldn't understand a word, because they were new to his accent. Therefore I can second that subtitles are helpful, especially if you are distracted from listening or need assistance to understand spoken language (thus serves as a "gap filler"). Now knowing that the Chinese have THIS much trouble with their own tongue, I feel pity for them. |