No time to post a proper response to your questions but I’ll try later. Two things real quick:

I would be interested in what user robertk says about this topic. You should invite him to this thread.

Also, The Fix hits both levels, meaning and form. Add to that the very real third-dimension with Mandarin - Tones.

Tones make spoken mandarin 3-D, not limited to just form and meaning.

Being very aware what goes on in my head, I believe I would be better trained in both form and meaning by a sandwich or club-sandwich format that you use in the newbie/elementary lessons between you and Jenny.

For instance in The Fix(my live thoughts in parentheses):

Amber/Dave says a line: ‘What would you like to eat?’

I say, ‘Nin xihuan chi3 shenme?’

Connie gives the answer, ‘Ni xihuan chi1 sheme?’
(I’m thinking: wow, i got it right but i used a more polite form and i messed up the tone for eat. The grammar was correct, the character, even the word choice but not the vocal expression of it)

…then we’re onto the next line.

If The Fix used a sandwich format by having a blank space after her correct answer, I could correct myself using her answer as the model and really hit the next layer of understanding).

If The Fix had a club sandwich/big mac format on the longer sentences, with her correct answer repeated yet again, I might be able to hit all three meaning, form, and tonal expression.

Great topic.

jonathan

Henning,
You’ve convinced me that mobile listenign (the synthetic bit) may be fundamentally different than desk-bound listening (the analytical bit). Much food for throught here. You’ve also illustrated the difficulty of sustained focus - attention is selective and not under the full control of the individual - no matter where you are.

Jeremy,
Apparently the studies show that most people (if not all people) tend to focus on meaning before structure, and on content words before function words. We’re pre-wired to look for meaning, so it isn’t surprising that your mind gravitates towards those anchors. As for longer passages, we can certainly look at that.

Mr Me,
Apologies if my post lacks clarity.
I think your point about reading is interesting. It’s a true case of different strokes and on your own terms. Do whatever works for you. Some people appraoch a new language without a single written word, but clearly that’s not for everyone. Go with what works for you.

Hanyu_xuesheng,
I’ve heard much about Birkenbihl from German friends and I know it has made a powerful impact on many learners. Thus far, however, I haven’t really had the time to resarch it. On first blush, however, I’m not sure I get it. Decoding is most certainly the first step in listening - receiving the sounds, recognizing the elements, etc. But this is not news - it is the default setting for the human brain. I guess I’m missing soemthing here. I’ll try to do some research over the weekend if I can get the time.

Orlando,
Chunks and recycling are definitely all good!

Bill,
Watching a child learn is one of the most fascinating things you can do. Piaget built a career, and a place in scientific history, by observing his own kids.
There are crucial differences between how they learn and how we grown ups do it, but its a great topic. Your observations are welcome.

Ken Carroll

When I embarked on my journey to learn Chinese I decided to follow in the steps of my now 5 year old daughter. When she was about 3 she started speaking. But well before that she understood. The lesson I learned, was that by being exposed to the language, any language, is primary to picking it up. Even though she couldn’t speak at 2, she definitely understood. She slowly put this together and now talks non-stop, and very loud I might add.

In my study of Chinese, now 10 months long, I’ve only made it to lesson 60. I re-play the lessons just to have more exposure to them. I find that, just like with a song you get stuck in your head, I’ll end up repeating some phrase over and over.

This has been good. I definitely recognize words when I hear them in a new lesson. Sometimes I will know the meaning, sometimes, even though I’ve heard the word, I don’t remember the meaning, and that’s what I need to work on next. So I think I’ve got the sounds and the hearing down, and just need to work on the cognitive part.

I’ll need to remember back and see what conclusions I can draw from my daughters’ experience to help with this next step.

Bill

Please read this:
http://195.149.74.241/BIRKENBI.....nglish.pdf

The first step is always to understand the meaning of the words. This is done by a word-by-word translation, created in process called “de-coding”. This process is important because the de-coder (the learner) gets a lot of inside into the language structure and grammar patterns.

The second step is to listen actively and to read the decoded text in parallel, so that the words, their meanings and the pattern can sink into memory.

In a third step - now you understand the text and audio fully- you listen passively while doing other things without consciously listening at all.

Further steps are learning characters, writing them, and more - see the PDF.

I read your blog post twice, and still don’t quite understand it. The technical pedagogical jargon is a bit beyond me, I can’t really answer it meaningfully.

For my part, I can’t learn words unless I read them. Listening comprehension comes only after acquiring vocabulary by extensive reading. Spoken sentences with unfamiliar words tend to just dissolve into a blur of indistinguishable sounds. So I do most of my language learning outside of ChinesePod, and use it mostly to work on listening comprehension.

For some reason listening comprehension in Chinese is uniquely difficult, for me at least, far more so than in the European languages I’ve studied. Perhaps because there are so many homonyms, or because all syllables tend to have the same length, unlike European languages where syllables of multisyllabic words are spoken much more quickly than in one-syllable words. Chinese characters make reading uniquely challenging, but the advantage is that you can read at your own pace, while listening always has to take place in real time, at the speed of the speaker, which is somehow always too fast. And the homonym problem doesn’t occur with reading, in fact it’s the exact opposite, with a wide diversity in character forms and shapes.

So I can read and understand at a much higher level than I can listen and understand. If I had to learn by listening alone (or if I had to study some language in the Amazon rainforest that had no written form) I probably would have given up a long time ago.

I wonder if others learn languages in the same way (acquiring a reading knowledge before listening comprehension and conversational ability).

When I’m listening I focus on the rhythm of the language, the recognizable words or phrases. My mind anchors to the known words and works around those. The best analogy I can think of is a puzzle, when you have a corner or middle section (or both) and you start trying to piece it all together. I tend to be more concerned about pronouncing the words correctly first then attaching meaning to them.

Typically I repeat the Chinese during the translation time. This helps my mind and mouth get familiar with the dialog. The ‘phrasing’ is very important to me. I can tell when I’m saying something that sounds wooden and when it just rolls out as though I’ve been saying the words since childhood. On the second or third listen I’ll speak with Jenny to try and match her timing and tones.

What I’ve been trying desperately to find and hoping that ChinesePod would produce are more lengthy discussions/stories/dialogs in Chinese, with little to no English at the Elementary level.

Repetition of phrases and words within the 2-5 minute (or longer!) dialog/story thingy would be a huge help. 30 seconds for a dialog is a bit too short for my mind to do anything with. I’m still trying to process the first sentence when the last one is being spoken.

In both scenarios there is no clear focus - it moves constantly while I excavate different sorts of language nuggets.

Scenario 1:
On the way to work I basically *follow content* with varying degrees of concentration. Subconsciously cutting out details and unknown words is quite prevalent in those situations - which is why relistening is valuable.
When concentrated I am parallely trying to get a grip on new vocab and occasionally repeat phrases and short sentences. This works especially well in familiar older shows that are beyond the 4th repetition cycle.

Sometimes it happens that I suddently hear an interesting phrase, a word I just recently learned in another lesson, or a forgotten piece of vocab. In those cases I stop following the storyline and play around with the vocab in my head - and try jumping back into the content stream later.

Due to processing latencies in my head I do not focus much on analyzing grammar or repeating structures beyond a threshold of about 10 words.

Scenario 2:
Desk learning is much different. Here I can follow podcasts more concentrated and listen to them before and after reading the Dialogue. In that situation I can look at a) details and b) larger structures.

I do both Dialogue, Expansion and Exercises (which are basically repetitions of the Expansion sentences). Content moves in the back. Threefore I analyze words by Hanzi - they help me understanding semantics and to draw lines to other vocab. More importantly, unlike in Scenario 1, I see *every* character and therefore every detail.

Besides that I am always delighted to discover a beautiful idiomatic expression or a nifty sentence construction - which I can usually analyze but not build on my own. Those I am also certainly not able to fully embrace on the move.

Example: Today I did the Expansion on the Smoking-Media-Lesson and found this beauty:
他把自己受到的不公正待遇发表在网上后，得到了很多网友的声援。

Now that 把-construction is pure programing logic, isn’t it?

By the way:
There have been several warm days here with significant effects on wardrobe. Now *that* can create some mean distractions when trying to follow podcasts.