Hello everyone!
Welcome to my channel!
I’m Grace.
Today’s topic is about how to improve your Chinese listening skills.
In this video, I’m going to give you three listening strategies
to help you get a higher score in Chinese listening tests
and also enable you to understand Chinese native speakers more.
OK, without further ado, let’s get started!
Before getting into the three strategies,
I want you to think about that whether you have this habit—
when you're listening to Chinese,
do you always try to translate all the words you hear in your mind
and try to memorize every sound and word?
If you have this habit, try to get rid of it
because it prevents you from
reaching a higher level of listening comprehension.
So, after throwing away this bad habit,
let’s start to build these three habits of effective listeners!
The first listening strategy is
“Pay attention to keywords and the main information”
So think about this, when you’re speaking your own language,
will you speak all the words with equal emphasis?
Usually not, right?
or else you’ll sound like a robot.
We usually stress the important words carrying the main information
when we’re speaking.
That is, some words are more important than others.
Then, you know, what you need to do is to
catch those words to understand the main points from speakers.
So stop trying to memorize every word you hear,
and you will understand why this won’t work
when I introduce the third strategy.
Now, let’s practice using the first strategy:
I will give you a sentence and read it first,
and then you can try to find out
what are the important words in the sentence
and try to get the main point of the sentence.
OK, these are the keywords of this sentence,
normally the keywords will be nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs, and negative auxiliaries.
So when you were listening to this sentence,
even if you only catch these five words,
it’s pretty much enough. You got all the main information.
So, remember to pay attention to keywords
instead of every detail you hear.
The second strategy is about
how to tackle the words or phrases that you don’t know
when you’re listening.
In this case, you can apply the second strategy I am going to teach you,
that is “Utilize the context and your prior knowledge”
When you’re listening to Chinese,
there is a big chance that you can not understand everything,
but don’t worry about that.
When you encounter some new words and phrases,
don’t panic, try to use the context to figure out the meaning
of the words or the phrases
and you can also use your prior knowledge,
which comes from your life experiences and use this to figure out
the meaning of that word under those circumstances.
Because most of the time,
you just need to get a general meaning of the words or phrases
and then you can keep on listening
to understand what the speaker wants to say.
OK, let’s move on to the third strategy.
That is “Group words into larger units to memorize and process them”
One of the differences between listening and reading is that
listening requires more memorization
because when a person talks, they won’t repeat what they have said.
So memory plays an important role in your listening comprehension.
Here let’s find out how to memorize more
and understand more while listening.
First, we need to take a look at how our brain works:
After we receive some information,
such as hearing some words and sentences,
we store those things into our short-term memory,
and here is one thing that you need to know,
our short-term memory can only hold a few items
for a short amount of time.
So we take one item as a unit,
in order to memorize more and comprehend more,
we have to group words into a larger unit.
Instead of trying to memorize every single word and sound,
while we’re listening,
we need to find the connections between different words
and memorize them as a chunk.
That way you can fit more things into your short-term memory to process.
For example:
Instead of memorizing like this: 那個 / 長 / 頭髮 / 站 / 在 / 後面 / 的 / 女孩
Try to use this way: 那個 / 長頭髮 / 站在後面的 / 女孩
So remember, in order to memorize
and process more words while listening,
you have to group words into larger units.
OK, let’s have a quick review:
To improve your Chinese listening skills,
you can try to:
First, Pay attention to keywords and the main information.
Second, Utilize the context and your prior knowledge.
Third, Group words into larger units to memorize and process them.
So, that’s all for today,
if you find this video helpful,
please give it a thumbs-up
and if you haven’t, remember to subscribe to my channel
for more information.
I’ll see you next time!
Bye!