I relate to this with Japanese. I think part of the issue is that a learner processes every word individually and then makes sense of the sentence which is difficult or at times impossible to do in real time. While a native or fluent person processes the language in chunks due to already being used to all the most common patterns and phrases. Like the example with the doctor losing his patience or patients. You could omit the word entirely and someone native or fluent by the time they hear "lost his..." would already expect the next word to be patience, cool, temper, etc. and once they hear what it is, there is 0% confusion because it lines up with your intuitive expectation of the pattern. A learner on the other hand has to put the sentence together first and even when you do it correctly you might still have some underlying doubt that you could potentially be wrong on your assumption of which word it is.
Lieber Tommy, du sprichst mir mit diesem Video aus der Seele, was den Struggle beim Chinesisch lernen angeht. Ich war vor 2 Tagen an der Rossmann-Kasse und spitzte die Ohren, als sich ein chinesisches Pärchen direkt hinter mir auf Mandarin unterhielt. Außer "对" habe ich absolut kein Wort verstanden und ging frustriert nachhause. Es ist schwer dabei motiviert zu bleiben, wenn sich so viele Wörter so ähnlich anhören und doch eine komplett andere Bedeutung haben. Aber ich gebe nach 2 Jahren des Lernens nun nicht mehr auf und werde weiter machen. Liebe Grüße und alles Gute an dich.
You describe it very accurately, that's what I've been struggling with for a long time as well. It requires a lot of time and effort, but is totally worth it!
Good video. I have been learning Chinese myself for almost two years now. And I often also find it hard to understand Chinese without reading Hanzi🥲 Especially when native speakers talk to me how they would normally be speaking in their daily life🙊
That what you're doing there, listening and guessing what is being said, imho is the best exercise to learn and improve any language (even your own native language!)
In fact, this is my main method right now to study English and Spanish. I go through whole movies, sentence by sentence, listening and trying to understand every word. When I don't understand, I look into the subtitles (which I have downloaded into a text file). It took me about 4 months to go through my first Spanish movie 😅 But each new one takes less and less time. Now it's like 3 to 4 days.
Thank you for sharing your language learning journey in an authentic way! I’m learning languages myself (Spanish & German with hiragana for anime). I’m tired of all those “I learned Chinese in 30 days” videos that don’t show the real journey that happens in a language.
Hahahah yeah I also can't stand it. Language learning is a loooong journey and naturally becomes part of someones personality bc it has to be done daily.
I had a similar problem and my solution was to change the way I study my flashcards. I used to see the character(s) and remember the pronunciation and the meaning of it. Then I changed it to 'listening' the pinyin pronunciation of the word and identifying the tones and meaning and imagine the character in my head. This type of dual repeatition from character>meaning,sound and sound>meaning, character forced me to master both aspects of the words. It's still not the perfect solution but it was very great for words I already knew. For words that have many homophones you have to add some type of sentence or phrase though.
I agree. I can understand my chinese teacher during lessons, but when talking to natives on the streets its a whole different story. I can hardly understand and I often ask them to repeat. It's really frustrating, but as U said it's part of the process. We have to stay strong. Nice video
I studied Latin for 3 years in an American middle school(oh all the translation practices) but i still think that listening and speaking is the better learning method for learning a new language. Please have some patience if you are having challenges even interpreting voice messages. Listen it for a few more times. And also keep in mind that sometimes when I am trying to listen my friend's voice message i get confused as well because the audio is blurred(if that's the expression for it) so it's very normal.
This may or may not be useful, but instead of learning a single word, learn the word in a phrase. In German, you don't learn just "Hund", you learn "der Hund". In your example, Jing can mean lots of things, but usually, native speakers would clarify by giving an example of what Jing we are talking about, especially if the person they said the sentence to looks confused. So, do you know Jing? Bai She Jing, or Hu Li Jing? And then you will understand what the context is (but usually, a sentence does not exist in a vacuum, so there may be some hint beforehand leading up to the sentence for you to figure it out).
You think Chinese had a lot of homophones? Try studying a language that borrows huge amounts of vocabulary from Chinese but drops the tones 😂. The Japanese language was basically one big homophone to me for years and years. For some strange reason I didn’t quit and kept studying it. Your brain does adjust. But I still get brain farts. A tutor used the word 整理 seiri with me which means to arrange in the right order or to sort, and I was hearing 生理 seiri which means menstruation or when a woman has her period 😂. It’s been over 6 years since I lived in Japan and I only lived there two years so I shouldn’t beat myself up over it but I am (obviously) You never know when you might have a breakthrough and things might start clicking better than before. You’ll get conversational if you’re patient enough.
@@AthanasiosJapan Rarely. Yes there are some words with different pitch accent but in the above example the pitch accent is the same. Most of them are the same. Chinese teachers go overboard teaching pitch accent. Japanese teachers barely mention it.
I speak both at a fairly decent level and I still struggle with Chinese listening more than I do Japanese. At least for Japanese there's a ton of ''Original'' Japanese words that are easy to distuingish whereas Chinese is 1 or usually two syllable Hanzi (and god dont get me started on all the Chengyu they use.. Yojijyukugo is not nearly as frequent). That said, you can sense that Hanzi was made for Chinese, the mess of every character in Japanese having 2+ pronunciations is quite the nightmare.
I had the exact same problem with Japanese and the only solution was massive amounts of input. First using subs (luckily Chinese people LOVE making subs for their media) and then without subs.
挺/very 3rd tone 听/listen 1st tone 文化／culture 化 4th tone 花 🌹／flower 1st tone You speak them with an accurate tone. But when you listen to them, you cannot discern the tones.
My advice is to go talk to people. Talking to someone and having them use a word that you should know but don’t is the best way to not forget it again. Obviously if you’re not in China that’s easier said than done but it was much more effective than any other studying I did. I’m not in Asia so I’ll be doing input just like you recommend for now.
I only speak chinese for a couple minutes a day net time. Should increase it a bit. My proportion currently is like 90% input and 10% output. A bit out of balance I would say haha
Hi Thomas. Ich versuche gerade eine App zu entwickeln, die genau dieses Problem lösen soll. Man muss dort immer einen Satz zuerst hören und darf erst danach die Wörter aufdecken. Zunächst nur für Englisch. Hättest du vielleicht Lust, die kurz zu testen und mir ein Feedback zu geben?
Hallo Thomas, ich kenne das, ich lerne (mit Pausen) seit 40 Jahren Chinesisch und bin nur ein kleines bisschen weiter, aber Mandarin Corner ist auch für mich noch ziemlich schwierig. Ungarisch habe ich in Ungarn nur durch Hören und Sprechen gelernt, ich weiß also, dass es geht. Aber Chinesisch braucht einfach mehr Zeit. Inzwischen habe ich Niederländisch angefangen und verstehe Videos beim ersten Mal. Für Chinesisch braucht man einfach mehr Geduld. Und von Lukes Latein bin ich genauso fasziniert, es klingt so schön aus seinem Mund. Englisch verstehe ich sehr gut, aber meinen Akzent habe ich mir noch nicht abtrainiert.
Actually, the homophones are a problem mostly in Mandarin, and not in Cantonese or other Chinese dialects. There is a poem in Mandarin that is just "shi" (with all possible tones), however if you read it Cantonese, all those homophones are different words.
I can actually probably help you. I am an American that was at least fluent in Chinese so I might have some tricks for you. At the time i was studying Chinese I was already fluent in French. I did achieve fluency in Chinese but lost it as I have barely ever used it over the past 3-4 years. I am currently learning Danish, so I am on the language adventure you are on and am procrastinating learning my Danish conjunctions as I write this. If you would like to connect and chat, shoot me your e-mail, I'd be more than happy to help. If not I'll leave some generic advice. It sounds to me like you are not doing enough input or ear training exercises. Maybe you are (I am just guessing from this video) but you really need to be watching a ton of videos or just audios and stopping the videos constantly and drilling your brain on what was just said. For example in one of your sentences you gave as an example for 'yi zhong'. I can still remember watching a particular video where I actually wrote this down about 15 times and replayed the same sentence on a video until it was seared into my head. We all learn differently but for me I absolutely loved learning how to say very specific things in Chinese so I loved watching videos in chinese that explained chinese grammar. I want to mention that this admittedly was slow at first and I had to learn all the relevant vocabulary and alot of the directional verbs so that you can talk about sentences in a certain way, but it was well worth that initial effort. That way I learned how to talk about the language so it was easier to ask friends on we chat what they just said or what their sentence was in Chinese. I ended up living in China and passed the HSK 6, but don't really have a lot of use for it outside of talking with Chinese people here in the USA. This helped a lot for me. Take care and happy polyglotting. 继续努力学习吧
Chinese is actually not very difficult as you said,what you need is just real life listening.我的英语学习阶段可能与你差不多，完全能理解你的感受，但是我认为英语的词汇比汉语要多很多。如果可以的话能不能加你的微信，一起学习。
I relate to this with Japanese. I think part of the issue is that a learner processes every word individually and then makes sense of the sentence which is difficult or at times impossible to do in real time. While a native or fluent person processes the language in chunks due to already being used to all the most common patterns and phrases. Like the example with the doctor losing his patience or patients. You could omit the word entirely and someone native or fluent by the time they hear "lost his..." would already expect the next word to be patience, cool, temper, etc. and once they hear what it is, there is 0% confusion because it lines up with your intuitive expectation of the pattern. A learner on the other hand has to put the sentence together first and even when you do it correctly you might still have some underlying doubt that you could potentially be wrong on your assumption of which word it is.
Lieber Tommy, du sprichst mir mit diesem Video aus der Seele, was den Struggle beim Chinesisch lernen angeht. Ich war vor 2 Tagen an der Rossmann-Kasse und spitzte die Ohren, als sich ein chinesisches Pärchen direkt hinter mir auf Mandarin unterhielt. Außer "对" habe ich absolut kein Wort verstanden und ging frustriert nachhause. Es ist schwer dabei motiviert zu bleiben, wenn sich so viele Wörter so ähnlich anhören und doch eine komplett andere Bedeutung haben. Aber ich gebe nach 2 Jahren des Lernens nun nicht mehr auf und werde weiter machen. Liebe Grüße und alles Gute an dich.
Liebe Doreen, schön deinen Kommentar zu lesen. Scheint wohl, dass wir mit diesen Herausforderungen nicht allein sein! 不要放弃!
In terms of linguistics, pragmatics is the KEY, input with context, that's it!
Exactly, I just listen to stuff, try to understand, and then look into the corresponding text. Over and over and over...
You describe it very accurately, that's what I've been struggling with for a long time as well. It requires a lot of time and effort, but is totally worth it!
Good video. I have been learning Chinese myself for almost two years now. And I often also find it hard to understand Chinese without reading Hanzi🥲 Especially when native speakers talk to me how they would normally be speaking in their daily life🙊
That what you're doing there, listening and guessing what is being said, imho is the best exercise to learn and improve any language (even your own native language!)
In fact, this is my main method right now to study English and Spanish. I go through whole movies, sentence by sentence, listening and trying to understand every word. When I don't understand, I look into the subtitles (which I have downloaded into a text file).
It took me about 4 months to go through my first Spanish movie 😅 But each new one takes less and less time. Now it's like 3 to 4 days.
Thank you for sharing your language learning journey in an authentic way! I’m learning languages myself (Spanish & German with hiragana for anime). I’m tired of all those “I learned Chinese in 30 days” videos that don’t show the real journey that happens in a language.
Hahahah yeah I also can't stand it. Language learning is a loooong journey and naturally becomes part of someones personality bc it has to be done daily.
I had a similar problem and my solution was to change the way I study my flashcards. I used to see the character(s) and remember the pronunciation and the meaning of it. Then I changed it to 'listening' the pinyin pronunciation of the word and identifying the tones and meaning and imagine the character in my head. This type of dual repeatition from character>meaning,sound and sound>meaning, character forced me to master both aspects of the words. It's still not the perfect solution but it was very great for words I already knew. For words that have many homophones you have to add some type of sentence or phrase though.
I agree. I can understand my chinese teacher during lessons, but when talking to natives on the streets its a whole different story. I can hardly understand and I often ask them to repeat. It's really frustrating, but as U said it's part of the process. We have to stay strong. Nice video
As a native speaker i must say, your grasp of the chinese tones is really really good. I can see you put in some hard work analyzing and studying it.
I studied Latin for 3 years in an American middle school(oh all the translation practices) but i still think that listening and speaking is the better learning method for learning a new language. Please have some patience if you are having challenges even interpreting voice messages. Listen it for a few more times. And also keep in mind that sometimes when I am trying to listen my friend's voice message i get confused as well because the audio is blurred(if that's the expression for it) so it's very normal.
There's a speech to text function in WeChat if you haven't notice. This might help
Also what’s ur hello talk id? Mind if I add you on that app?😂
A native is offering help, is he not going to take it?
This may or may not be useful, but instead of learning a single word, learn the word in a phrase. In German, you don't learn just "Hund", you learn "der Hund". In your example, Jing can mean lots of things, but usually, native speakers would clarify by giving an example of what Jing we are talking about, especially if the person they said the sentence to looks confused. So, do you know Jing? Bai She Jing, or Hu Li Jing? And then you will understand what the context is (but usually, a sentence does not exist in a vacuum, so there may be some hint beforehand leading up to the sentence for you to figure it out).
You think Chinese had a lot of homophones? Try studying a language that borrows huge amounts of vocabulary from Chinese but drops the tones 😂. The Japanese language was basically one big homophone to me for years and years. For some strange reason I didn’t quit and kept studying it. Your brain does adjust. But I still get brain farts. A tutor used the word 整理 seiri with me which means to arrange in the right order or to sort, and I was hearing 生理 seiri which means menstruation or when a woman has her period 😂. It’s been over 6 years since I lived in Japan and I only lived there two years so I shouldn’t beat myself up over it but I am (obviously)
You never know when you might have a breakthrough and things might start clicking better than before. You’ll get conversational if you’re patient enough.
Sometimes, pitch accent differentiates homophones in Japanese.
@@AthanasiosJapan Rarely. Yes there are some words with different pitch accent but in the above example the pitch accent is the same. Most of them are the same. Chinese teachers go overboard teaching pitch accent. Japanese teachers barely mention it.
I speak both at a fairly decent level and I still struggle with Chinese listening more than I do Japanese. At least for Japanese there's a ton of ''Original'' Japanese words that are easy to distuingish whereas Chinese is 1 or usually two syllable Hanzi (and god dont get me started on all the Chengyu they use.. Yojijyukugo is not nearly as frequent). That said, you can sense that Hanzi was made for Chinese, the mess of every character in Japanese having 2+ pronunciations is quite the nightmare.
thank you for your videos, man.
praying for you, you are nice
I am in like pretty much exactly the same situation lol. Happy to hear I’m not alone!
13” voice message 3:44 這是很象餃子🥟的一種，但是它不是餃子。 She could be describing wonton or empanada.
Oh wow same same. Lerne mandarin seit 1jahr, ich denke unser lvl ist vergleichbar. Danke, hatte schon grosse Zweifel
I had the exact same problem with Japanese and the only solution was massive amounts of input. First using subs (luckily Chinese people LOVE making subs for their media) and then without subs.
挺/very 3rd tone
听/listen 1st tone
文化／culture 化 4th tone
花 🌹／flower 1st tone
You speak them with an accurate tone. But when you listen to them, you cannot discern the tones.
我是一个中国人，现在在学意大利语，已经学了快三年了，我知道学习一门外语有多难，加油！！
我最亲爱的朋友，别放弃!
My advice is to go talk to people. Talking to someone and having them use a word that you should know but don’t is the best way to not forget it again.
Obviously if you’re not in China that’s easier said than done but it was much more effective than any other studying I did.
I’m not in Asia so I’ll be doing input just like you recommend for now.
Ahhh the beauty of linguistics
Hay I have same issues one year and 1/2 it's a work in progress 😂👍🇲🇽
At least your speaking is pretty good. How many hours a day do you put in?
I only speak chinese for a couple minutes a day net time. Should increase it a bit. My proportion currently is like 90% input and 10% output. A bit out of balance I would say haha
@@linguaholictommy that sounds like an the best balance in my opinion, at least until the 2 year mark. I think you’re on the right track!
Hi Thomas. Ich versuche gerade eine App zu entwickeln, die genau dieses Problem lösen soll. Man muss dort immer einen Satz zuerst hören und darf erst danach die Wörter aufdecken. Zunächst nur für Englisch. Hättest du vielleicht Lust, die kurz zu testen und mir ein Feedback zu geben?
Hey Dennis, schreib mich dazu entweder auf Instagram an oder meine Email: linguaholictommy@gmail.com
Hallo Thomas, ich kenne das, ich lerne (mit Pausen) seit 40 Jahren Chinesisch und bin nur ein kleines bisschen weiter, aber Mandarin Corner ist auch für mich noch ziemlich schwierig. Ungarisch habe ich in Ungarn nur durch Hören und Sprechen gelernt, ich weiß also, dass es geht. Aber Chinesisch braucht einfach mehr Zeit. Inzwischen habe ich Niederländisch angefangen und verstehe Videos beim ersten Mal. Für Chinesisch braucht man einfach mehr Geduld.
Und von Lukes Latein bin ich genauso fasziniert, es klingt so schön aus seinem Mund.
Englisch verstehe ich sehr gut, aber meinen Akzent habe ich mir noch nicht abtrainiert.
You use 得、地 correctly.
Most of the Chinese can't get it right.
Actually, the homophones are a problem mostly in Mandarin, and not in Cantonese or other Chinese dialects.
There is a poem in Mandarin that is just "shi" (with all possible tones), however if you read it Cantonese, all those homophones are different words.
I can actually probably help you. I am an American that was at least fluent in Chinese so I might have some tricks for you. At the time i was studying Chinese I was already fluent in French. I did achieve fluency in Chinese but lost it as I have barely ever used it over the past 3-4 years. I am currently learning Danish, so I am on the language adventure you are on and am procrastinating learning my Danish conjunctions as I write this. If you would like to connect and chat, shoot me your e-mail, I'd be more than happy to help.
If not I'll leave some generic advice. It sounds to me like you are not doing enough input or ear training exercises. Maybe you are (I am just guessing from this video) but you really need to be watching a ton of videos or just audios and stopping the videos constantly and drilling your brain on what was just said. For example in one of your sentences you gave as an example for 'yi zhong'. I can still remember watching a particular video where I actually wrote this down about 15 times and replayed the same sentence on a video until it was seared into my head. We all learn differently but for me I absolutely loved learning how to say very specific things in Chinese so I loved watching videos in chinese that explained chinese grammar. I want to mention that this admittedly was slow at first and I had to learn all the relevant vocabulary and alot of the directional verbs so that you can talk about sentences in a certain way, but it was well worth that initial effort. That way I learned how to talk about the language so it was easier to ask friends on we chat what they just said or what their sentence was in Chinese. I ended up living in China and passed the HSK 6, but don't really have a lot of use for it outside of talking with Chinese people here in the USA. This helped a lot for me. Take care and happy polyglotting. 继续努力学习吧
Chinese is actually not very difficult as you said,what you need is just real life listening.我的英语学习阶段可能与你差不多，完全能理解你的感受，但是我认为英语的词汇比汉语要多很多。如果可以的话能不能加你的微信，一起学习。