I know how much you guys love ChinesePod’s Video Hotpot series, so I thought I’d offer a little more listening practice in video format. Both feature female native speakers.
The first is a pop star by the name of 张含韵 (Zhāng Hányùn) / Mabel Zhang. She doesn’t say anything very complicated, but she talks at a natural speed. This might provide just the right amount of challenge for some of you. [link]
The second one is a Chinese Engadget “vodcast.” The topic is tech, so it’s more difficult, and to make matters worse, the hostess speaks quite quickly. This one has English subtitles to help you along, though. [link]
Let me know what you think of this kind of listening practice.
Hi John,
Both of these are not too difficult to understand, IF you’re already familiar with the vocabulary.
However they both suffer from excess background noise, which makes it MUCH more difficult to hear the tones for those of us unfamiliar. Added to this the microphone is too far away from the speaker, so clarity is reduced. One day (hopefully soon), we’ll all be looking at Chinesepod on our iPod Video machines, and the real life examples such as Video Hotpot are also very welcome additions.
Maybe one videocast per week will be an achievable target in future?
Hey, great stuff. I enjoy watching Chinese television on the internet, and so I’m used to trying to figure out what people are saying. However, in your movies it was hard to use my ears because they were so pleasing to the eyes.
Maybe that will encourage some of us to pay real close attention.
Thanks John, they’re probably both beyond me but it’s good that you could suggest something for the majority of people here to watch and discuss, to tide us over. We’re all addicted to our hotpot you know.
Am I right that these are Flash only? I prefer the mp4 format which I can download, play on my computer (no flash player), and play on my portable mp3/mp4 player.
That’s one disadvange to youtube, it’s difficult to rip the videos. The code is written so you can’t get a direct swf link for a video and so you can’t save it as a video file. I have an swf to 3gp convertor but you need to be able to save the original file.
They’re a bit advanced for me but I could probably work them out and a lot of listens.
This kind of input is really helpful (or at least will be when I have advanced some more). Ecouragingly I could actually pick out a whole bunch of words from the first one (would have been better if they were all in the same sentance though). Did she really say hello in English before she says hello everybody in Chinese??
The second was too fast for anywords really but again one day.
As for the quality, well I think it is just about right there is obviously a place for clearer better quality videos of course but real conversations are going to take place noisy environments so the more practice the better I say.
Lastly I agree with pandagator, there is an article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4921690.stm that gives the problem a more acedemic standing.
Interestingly there are a couple of points where she is speaking whilst laughing which must be harder to understand and also begs the question. What do Chinese people do when they have blocked sinuses, speach impediments, partial deafness, just been to the dentist ect. etc. etc.?
Presumably they still make themselves understood, which would imply that tonal ques are not the be all and end all?
Hi John, I think it provides people with some good examples of what’s available out there.
Here’s a link short clip of a song that I bet lots of people like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXoRKrWu9YE
There are Chinese subtitles and I’d say at least 90% of the words have been presented in the various podcasts, so Cpoders–get your WordBank out!
I have lots of taped Chinese tv in .mov format, but my upload speeds made it too much of a chore to put this stuff up. If someone has a workaround, let me know, I’d be happy to share for educational purposes.
Do save clips from youtube to your computer for later viewing check out the following link:
http://zfreez.com/web/Ut.htm
Maybe we could have a section in the wiki with links to recommended chinese language TV streams or clips.
Sorry if the quality was too low, or the difficulty level was too high, but like Chris, said, if you can pick out some words, you’re on the right track. (And yes, she really does say “hello” first thing.)
The thing is, I think the first girl speaks in a pretty typical cutesy Chinese girl way (although pretty quickly, without pausing for many breaths). You’re all used to the sophisticated Jenny Zhu, but a lot of Chinese girls actually sound something like this.
Thanks for that link Andrea. Is there anyway to convert .flv format in something more useable though?
Have you noticed in the second one, the English bits like engadget, ipod nano etc seems slower than the rest? They probably aren’t though really, it’s just we’re a lot more used hearing English.
Bazza
I have not tried to convert anything from flv, but it seems possible. See the following discussion:
http://www.videohelp.com/forum.....59578.html
Would be good to be able to. With the flv files I played so far in my flv player I was never able to rewind backward, for example to listen to a phrase over and over again.
Thanks chinesepod (and John Sinosplice) for the focus on spoken Chinese!! It really helps a lot in learning the language.
Bazza download the videolan player that is linked to on the zfreez site or get it from here : http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
This is a no frills media player that is a godsend for all those .avi files etc where media player and quicktime barf. Plays lots of audio formats too. It handles .flv file with ease.
John,
Great idea! I mean how are we going to function in a real life situation in china if our ears are only trained to understand Jenny’s crystal clear voice coming to us from a studio? (btw, does anyone know the chinese expression for a rhetorical question? or does it have a nice cheng2yu3 for that?)
For me, an ideal situation would be to have loads of real-life, hard-to-understand-although-I-know-the-words-input, have my ears work on them for a couple of times - and then actually be able to see a transcript to check if I understood. In a less ideal world I’d settle for loads of input, though. I’m looking forward to see how this plays out.
RHETORICAL QUESTIONS - Hi Wout,
One way to say a rhetorical question is to use
难道，
nan2dao4.
这件是儿难道你不知道吗？
zhei4 jian4 shi4r nan2dao4 ni2 bu4 zhi1dao ma?
You mean you don’t know about this sort of thing?
I still don’t find it easy to put this into practice in my spoken Chinese. Usually I just use a negative sentence like 你不怕吗？ This invites a bit of a response though, so it’s not truelllly rhetorical. I’ll defer a full explanation to John or others. I don’t think I’ve heard it used yet in a Cpod cast. I also know it’s quite common and not a particularly hard structure or phrase, in fact I’ve seen it used in Doraemon comics which is targeted for …kids.
Wout,
“Rhetorical question” can be written as 反问 (fan3wen4).
Lantian,
Be careful about 错别字 (cuo4bie2zi4) — mistyped characters. You meant to write:
这件事儿难道你不知道吗？
Excellent! I think it would be extremely valuable to have more of this sort of thing. The value lies not so much in there being a video (we can all find all sorts of rubbish on the internet ourselves) but in your preselection of it as one that we should be able to understand (some indication of level / podcast lesson-dependencies would be good).
Even better it would be good if either transcripts could be provided (need not be free) and / or a list of words / phrases used within such videos.
Thanks for the advice, John and David. Let me see if I understood you correctly by putting these into context. Please ruthlessly correct all the mistakes I have made in the following sentence. I *must* have a couple, I’m still a beginner. Lexical errors, grammatical errors, have no mercy on them
Also, please tell me how you would phrase the same two sentences, I still need to root out European language constructions. Here goes:
如果我要创造所谓”反问”,应该使用”难道”词,对不对?
比如说:
“我们只听 Jenny,难道会听得懂别中国人吗?”
Ru2guo3 wo3 yao4 chuang4zao4 suo3wei4 “fan3wen4 “,ying1gai1 shi3yong4 “nan2dao4 “ci2 ,dui4bu2dui4 ?
Bi3ru2 shuo1
“Wo3men zhi3 ting1 Jenny, nan2dao4 hui4 ting1de2dong3 bie2 zhong1guo2ren2 ma ?”
If I want to create a so-called “rhetorical question”, I need to use the word “难道”, right? For example: If we only listen to Jenny, we couldn’t understand other chinese people, could we?
哎呀,我犯错了, “听得懂” de “得” 当然应该是轻声.
A couple of things I’m curious about:
Is it correct to use 创造 in this context?
Should I say 反问 or 反问句?
(I know, I’m too perfectionistic, can’t help it)
Wout asked, “Should I say 反问 …”
fan3wen4 (thanks to John of Sinosplice)
I was just wondering, what probably every student of Chinese wonders, do you say 反问 or do you say fan3wen4?
Just looking at my flash-popsicle-sticks last night and becoming aware of the process of reading Chinese characters.
For example: I looked at 聊天 and the puzzle seemed to be, “what does it SOUND like”.. liao tian1.. and then it registered with me, liao tian means to chat online. It seemed to be an extra step in comprehension. So I was trying just to look at the characters 聊天and sort of “feel” what it meant. Or how does it work in more advanced levels? Do you look at the characters and the meaning comes first, and then the pronunciation; or the pronunciation and then the meaning– I know they would happen so close together that it would seem simultaneous, but which is foremost? It seems that pictographs would have the meaning as primary and the pronunciation as secondary… but in this stage I am so focused on trying to remember what pronunciation goes with each character (and tone) and then, definitely AFTER that, comes the meaning. First comes “liao tian” and THEN the image of someone sitting in front of a computer.
Then I started wondering, How do I read English? If I look at a word (for example “real” as in “the REAL yellow pages”) do I go straight from the sight of the word, to the meaning? I’m not aware of any pronunciation that takes place at all, even though English is a spelled-out language. The sight of “real” brings to mind all the meaning of the word. Except now I have glanced at the word “real” on the phonebook in front of me so many times over the last minute, that it’s burning out my reaction to it.
真 looks real to me. It looks like a layer cake on a pedestal, with a cross stuck in the top of it. This is the symbol of “real, true.” Okay, I can accept that. I’m not sure how closely related the sound “zhen” is to the meaning, but the layer-cake-cross in itself is like the wordless symbol of truth. It’s like a recognized brand mark… like McDonald’s golden arches, or the red and white sign of my bank, or … oh I’ll stop now. Why did I have to start thinking all that. It’s a 反问… although even those characters 反问 have no significance to me yet, only that if I think about it, they sound like “fanwen” and if I think more about it, fanwen means “rhetorical question”… eventually I will look at 反问 and the meaning will jump straight into my eyes. at least that is the hope
p.s. the above post is why I appreciate chinesepod’s down to earth approach to language learning!
after ruminating on all that, I’m helped by the simple peaceful task of learning how to say things like “Octopus tentacles all around, my treat!”
错别字 - Hi John, thanks for pointing out the 是 vs 事. Seeing it after you pointed it out, of course it’s obvious to me. Besides the aid/challenge of the popup charcter selection with pinyin/hanzi and hitting return too quickly, I find I do this a lot more than in English, for example typing their vs there. I know I re-read that sentence on nandao a few times before I posted and it was like I had tunnelvision or something, the ’shi’ being outside my little flappers.
I’m hoping that it decreases as I write more, check more, read more — and get more feedback. Thanks!
BTW, can you give us a sentence example of how to use 反问, it’s the first time I’ve heard about it. Although I’ll probably start ’seeing’ the two characters everywhere now. It’s like when someone says ‘have you seen how many red cars there are on the road these days’ and all of a sudden it seems there are!
Catherine, I didn’t read my first language in that way, directly from shape to meaning, until I was 30. Most of my friends started in early high school, or at least said they did. Once you’ve got the knack, I don’t expect it to take that long in a second language but it could take a while, it depends how your brain works. Mine is wired for sound.
Hi C in NC and AuntySue,
I think when one is ‘reading’ it becomes this way, everything just pops up at once, instantaneously. And whatever one wants to retrieve at that particular moment becomes available. For example, reading subtitles in English or reading a book I am very non-aware of the words at all, the meaning just comes up. If however I am looking for the word ‘abc’ while scanning some text, letters of the word come to the forefront.
Lately I have been working on my ‘reading’ in Chinese and I have to say it is quite fascinating, all of this is a looping, iterative process, the words build layers as you learn different aspects, then one day all of a sudden it’s all in their, in your head –the sound, hanzi, meaning, lexis of the word, it just pops up. Until that moment when you hit that ‘new’ word…then it all starts over …very qi4-fen4 at times.
BTW John,
I just realized, natsukashi na, that I had a old Japanese girlfriend that used to get super frustrated at my misuse of ‘their’ and ‘there’. It seems I used to be rather indiscriminate in using it. Her phrase was ‘Even Japanese know how to use it right.” At that point I found some grammar book and was more careful. I guess this ‘pattern of behavior’ has re-emerged into my Chinese. She sure was prettier than you though.
I think videos like that are a great idea, John! I can’t believe that singer’s from Beijing! She said 我的家在北京… maybe they moved there? She really sounded like some Taiwanese girls I’ve met. The similarity was really striking. The speaker in the second show definitely sounded more “mainlander” to me. It was kind of interesting to. In Taiwan, there was a company that made a nearly identical-looking copy of the original iPod.
Do you think you can get some with Chinese men’s voices, too? I think most students already have female teachers, and hear more females in songs, etc…
Lantian, sorry to tell you but you’re still a little indiscriminate, but I’ve solved your problems. Check out the Off Topic thread in the Forum.
Hi John and everyone,
Just saw the link to these dorm-productions from your site. The guys are HILARIOUS and they got rhythm! Check ‘em out, all you need to study is to know lyrics from cheesy US and Chinese pop! Maybe Thyler and Ryan can hook up with these two and take over the world.
“Back Dorm Boys” (后舍男生)
http://www.sinosplice.com/life.....s#comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....7%E7%94%9F