I totally understand how you feel, “It always seems very hard to do with someone who is either above your level or is a native speaker.” Not to scare of newbies from talking but here are some very typical responses to my Chinese “Your pronunciation is terrible,” “I can’t understand what you’re saying,” “You sound like a baby,” “Let’s talk in English,” but I also get this “Your pronunciation is really good,” “Your voice in Chinese is very nice,” “You’re really fluent, why are you still studying?”, “You can’t read the newspaper? But you can speak so many words,” “If my English was as good as your Chinese, it would be enough.”

And just as the comments I get are all over the place, so are the levels of ”comfort’ that I get with various people. It is MUCH easier for me to speak to a variety of people in English. So for Chinese right now I have several strategies, all of which have made me ‘a better person’. I take all comments good or bad with about three sacks of salt thrown over my back. There’s a saying though, it takes 7 compliments to balance out one criticism. I keep talking, in Chinese. I pretty much ignore any ‘grammar’ feedback I get in a spoken conversation. I find people who ‘understand me’. I think the last one is most important. For a variety of reasons, mostly out of our control, the people listening to us are going to be different, so some will suit us and lots won’t. It’s sometimes worse than speed dating!

Offline I do work on my grammar, reflect on corrections people say to me, practice pronunciation, rehearse, repeat, look up words, etc. Personally I find that the repeating or re-output of set phrases is very hard b/c it’s hard to find the perfect ’situation’ to recall that set phrase. That’s why fluency and ‘talking’ is different. A conversation is first built upon expressing oneself. As a friend of mine said, “Never let language get in the way of communication.”

Is it ‘harder, better, worse or more interesting’ to talk to someone who talks better than you?

That’s just another way of saying: I agree [with your bias towards communicative output]…

Chinese Reading World
http://www.uiowa.edu/~chnsrdng/index.html

The cool thing about this site is that they’ve recorded someone reading the reading texts out loud (almost all of them- skip the first 10 beginner texts, they don’t have sound). I’ve found that by listening to them for a couple of times and then starting to speak along and/or repeat them has really helped me to improve the rythm and melody of my spoken chinese. Also, it’s really helped to train my ear to hearing the different tone combinations.

(Of course this site helps with reading as well, as the name suggests).

The texts are at two levels, ‘beginner’ (corresponding to chinesepod upper elementary/lower intermediate) and ‘intermediate’ (corresponding to chinesepod upper intermediate/advanced). The speed at which they are read is different at both levels.
The site has 80 (that’s eighty!) texts per level, on various subjects. I’ve been working through the first 30 beginner texts, but I’ve also looked at the intermediate ones. Intermediate #80 is a monologue which lasts for about ten minutes! (Well that’s what it felt like anyway).

Ie. it’s loads and loads of extra input (for all those who can’t get enough). Check it out!
I’d like to rename it: Chinese listening, reading and speaking world
http://www.uiowa.edu/~chnsrdng/index.html

Talking to myself is hugely important to me, If I ever get to speak Chinese this will be one of the main reason. I post about it here:
http://friedelcraft.blogspot.c.....urger.html
Which was sparked of by a comment to me on Chinesepod so its done the loop now.

自言自语
zìyánzìyǔ
talking to oneself

Of course, it might not be genuine for everyone.

For example, with “Are you Chinese?” and “No I’m American”, plus “she”, “they”, “we” etc, it would not be possible to construct “They are Chinese.” Especially so if one knows one of those convoluted European languages. In our case we were given those examples, plus an explanation that shi4 is used unchanged for all of those words. That’s learning Grammar, did you notice? Maybe not. It broadens the scope within which we can improvise. It’s a means to an end.

Every time we say something that’s not exactly written in the script, we’re using grammar that we’ve been taught, or abusing grammar if we didn’t know that that particular utterance was outside of our scope.
When we refrain from making a new construction, we’re hungering for a grammar lesson to give us guidance or reasurance and shift our free speaking scope outwards a little.

In the discussion so far, the emphasis is on *what* to say and the importance of ‘grammar’ vs ‘meaning’ or ‘communicative output’ versus ’structured practice’. On this subject, I would like to add this: It is clear that the focus at chinesepod is on ‘communicative output’ which is a good thing as that is the eventual goal isn’t it. If anything, grammar should be nothing more than a means to that end. I do believe that chinesepod could incorporate grammar in a meaningful way though, see below.

There’s more to *communication* practice than putting all the vocabulary, expressions and grammar one’s learned into practice though. There’s also the problem of the actual *speaking*, ie. making sounds that would actually be intelligible to native Mandarin speakers. There are a number of obstacles here which I am trying to overcome. Of course there’s the *tones*, the *initials* and the *finals*. Having a native speaker around when learning these can be a big help as this helps avoid learning them the wrong way. Therefore, I believe a session on speaking practice should involve a section on ‘the pronunciation of syllables’. However, there’s more. I noticed this when, after having worked really hard on my tones, initials and finals - and even 2-tone combinations - I still couldn’t read a chinese sentence aloud properly. There was just no rythm. I came across a paper on chinese-forums, which discusses just that, rythm of a sentence, or *prosody* (I didn’t know the word before). Basically, the idea is that prosody, ie. the rythm of an entire sentence, is a skill which is important to learn by itself. Perhaps this is the same as the ‘melody’ of a sentence which Ken sometimes refers to. It’s really a top down approach as opposed to the bottom-up approach of learning the tones. The importance of this is that if you speak in a natural rythm, your speech becomes a lot more comprehensible. The way they say it can be learned is (1) by taking sample sentences and having a native speaker read them out loud and then repeat in chorus with him and (2) by focusing on the rythm/melody/prosody when listening to a sentence. What I did - still not having a native speaker around - is to listen to a podcast for about five times first and then start talking along with Jenny. This has really helped me to build a basis for a rythm and it gets easier every time I do it.

Finally, my contribution to the discussion on grammar:
In the chinesepod dialogues, especially at the newbie and elementary level, I’ve noticed that you hardly ever use patterns which are generally regarded as *grammatical* patterns. I think it would help students if you changed this. You see, to learn a decontextualized grammatical pattern from a grammar book is does not constitute meaningful input (note the reference to intermediate podcast ‘you got schooled’). However, *exposure* to this patterns (even without explaining them) can help students in two ways. First, on a short-term communicative level: a lot of meaningful expressions require the use of a certain grammatical pattern. Second, on a more long-term level. The sooner one starts to get exposure to grammatical patterns, the sooner the brain starts to understand the pattern. You might think this is too hard for beginner level students, but I don’t agree: as long as you don’t tell them ‘this is grammatical pattern X, this is how it works, these are the exepctions, learn it by heart’, but just use a pattern in normal conversation, it will just be another bit of meaningful input. And then, after being exposed to it a number of times, ‘click’ and you unerstand it. For example, when I just started to study Mandarin I learned the word ‘jiu4′ (sorry no han4zi available at this time) and my online dictionary added the cryptic description ‘implies that something is just what it is’. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Now, after having seen the word used in context dozens of times, I have developed a strong intuition for where to expect it and when to use it. The above description still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense though. Also, although I now know how to use it, I would really have a hard time explaining the ‘rules’ for using ‘jiu4′.

Thanks