I want to follow on from a recent debate about using authentic listenings on ChinesePod. We certainly do plan to use some - recorded ‘on the streets’, without scripting, etc, in the coming months. However, I’d like to share some more on why we could not use an authentic only approach to build a program.

Natural conversation is free-flowing, unpredictable, spontaneous, colloquial. We don’t usually have time to edit/organize it as we would with prose. In fact, the basic unit of spoken language isn’t even the sentence - people rarely speak in full sentences in real speech. This is why, for example, speeches are written out in advance. The speech-maker has a pre-mediatated purpose. Without a structure it would ramble off aimlessly. But that’s exactly what happens with real conversation - it rambles wherever the speakers feel like going.

One of the bi-products of rambling is linguistic redundancy. There is a huge amount of redundancy in natural speech (and in written prose if they are not properly pruned/edited). We all use many more words in conversation than are necessary. Repetition is common - a luxury we would not tolerate in prose. Penny Ur, in her Teaching Listening Comprehension, puts it this way:

Redundant utterances may take the form of repetitions, false starts, re-phrasings, self-corrections, elaborations, tautologies, and apparently meaningless additions such as “I mean” and “You know”.

When we, erm, talk in conversation, and things like that, there are, like, tons of these, what do you call these ‘fillers’, is it? Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. You know, we kind of need all these fillers, I guess, because we need time to think, or something. In a real conversation. Or else people are like, just sitting there wondering why we’re sort of sounding like robots. I mean, part of it, I reckon, is because we’re kind of, what’s that called, hedging? Is that hedging?

Another issue is frequency/currency of the items. There are thousands of very low-frequency idioms and phrases that native speakers know but rarely use. I recently heard someone try to explain the portmanteau ‘Camerinucks’ (half American, half Canadian) to a Chinese person. The word came up in a wholly natural way, but it is not something I would ever subject a learner to: the return on that investment is going to be low.

And guess what? Much of this applies to real conversation in Mandarin.

Btw, Joanna Channell offers some readable research on this topic (in English usage) in her Vague Language.

More on this later.

Ken Carroll