My landlord speaks very, very quickly. As in, so quickly that if it were English and I were caught off guard I’d still have trouble understanding what he’s saying - think the same kind of speed and pacing as Spanish speakers applied to Chinese. His accent is pretty typical Taiwanese Mandarin, not the heaviest I’ve ever heard, but the speed makes it impossible for me to catch all but bits and pieces of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s just an endless stream of half-pronounced syllables with no apparent gaps between words (and often sentences).
Does anyone have any suggestions of movies, shows, podcasts, etc. I could use to practice listening to Mandarin spoken at faster than conversational speed? Any actors or reporters who are known for this? I understand the bulk of the news here in Taiwan and the Deutsche Welle Mandarin podcasts, so vocabulary isn’t a major problem for me, just need to practice listening to very fast paced conversation, preferably in less than standard Mandarin.
Record all conversations with your landlord - you have an invaluable resource right there. If he is willing - or you could pay him ‘tutor’ rates - get him to actually come in and make some listening-comprehension recordings for you. Have some questions for him, and record his answers, requesting that he talk at his usual speed. Then listen to the recordings a lot, and get your regular tutor to go over the recordings with you and explain anything you don’t understand.
I’m not at all sure that vocabulary isn’t the problem, along with accent and speed. Newscasts are going to stick to a fairly predictable set of words. Landlords usually don’t use the same set of words, unless they are very philosophical or aware-of-world-events landlords.
Usually in listening comprehension, words are the problem. Having instantaneous decoding of all the words the guy is using (you can’t know which ones he’ll use, of course, but theoretically speaking I mean) means that you can use your brain resources for doing the transformation from Standard Chinese with Word Boundaries into Squished Together Chinese with Taiwanese Accent Characteristics. What that means, practically, is that your brain has to work so hard parsing the input and separating the words from each other that there’s no time or effort available to understand the message. The parsing is even more difficult because of the accent. So what’s going on is something like this:
INPUT -> [Accent Decoder (-> Squished-Together Standard Words)] -> [Parser (->Standard Words)] -> Meaning
You have to “get” standard-sounding words first, then use your knowledge of the structure of the language to divide those up into words and know how the words relate to one another, then assign a meaning to each word and figure out what the whole sentence means. (And people do this without thinking on the fly, all day long. Language never fails to astonish me when I stop to think about it.)
I’d say divide and conquer. Become as familiar as possible with the accent itself, and concentrate on acquiring the words he’s most likely to use (surreptitious recording probably wouldn’t hurt in that regard…) I think that any practice using overly fast overly accented input is going to be helpful but probably not as much as attacking the root causes, and particularly so if you are just “practicing” on it, and have no way of knowing what was really said that you missed.
I’d still like to do my dream podcast for advanced students – a native speaker reads or speaks, then it’s delivered sentence by sentence: real speed and real speaker, slow speed by teacher, analysis by teacher [establishing meaning and pointing out any interesting structural or usage points], replay at slow speed by native speaker, replay at normal speed by native speaker]. Then the whole passage again at the end. Then a parallel passage using the same kind of language at the native speed. It wouldn’t be very hard to do if you had a source of public domain speech in Chinese, but I’m not sure there’s much of a market for it since advanced students are pretty small pool.
You know, it somehow never occurred to me to just record what he was saying. I’m not sure if asking him to come and talk with me would help as much, because it would probably be sticking mostly to normal conversational stuff that I already know, rather than random house-related Chinese vocabulary, which likely really is a big part of the problem. Just stuff that fits into that nebulous area of - never written and never said, but everyone seems to know it anyway. I ran into him earlier today doing something out in the hall, and I think he asked me if I was having a problem with water drippage or something along those lines. Of course, when I asked him what he meant, he just waved me off with a 沒關係. Maybe I need to make up a fake problem and get out the hidden cameras.
Thanks for the advice and the analysis! A podcast like that would be great; I often feel that my listening ability is worse than my speaking ability, though that shouldn’t be possible. Sometimes I say things that I doubt I would understand coming out of someone else’s mouth, particularly if I’m already familiar with their speech. I just don’t enjoy watching Chinese language TV and movies, and I’m not exactly a people person. That’s helped me get to a high reading and writing level in a relatively short time, but I’m only just starting to feel comfortable stepping into important situations and handling them entirely in Chinese - had a successful interview here that fell through for legal reasons recently.
I listen to the free Popup Chinese podcast for this purpose. They have varying levels – simple dialogues up to stories and speeches (at least, I think that’s what they are!) – performed by native speakers. The lower-level lessons are broken down line-by-line with the native speaker at normal speed/accent/squishing-together, followed by a super-clear and slow standard reading, followed by English. It’s helpful stuff, but unfortunately they walk a line between offbeat-and-wacky-therefore-interesting and outright outlandish and pointless (when your beginner lessons start to be full of vocab about pirates and zombies and Inception, you know you’ve gone too far). Also, there’s some pretty heavy erhua. YMMV as always.
If it’s really just an issue of learning to process fast speech, then couldn’t you practise by speeding up a regular Chinese podcast by 10-20%? A program like audacity will allow you to do this without changing the pitch (so everyone doesn’t sound like Alvin and the Chipmonks).
