How to listen to more Chinese

If you look at what methods work well for learning Chinese, you will see the word "immersion" over and over. The analogy is straightforward: Chinese is like water and learning the language is like learning to swim. You don't learn to swim by reading about it, you learn by getting wet, by immersing yourself, as often and as much as possible, but not so much that you actually drown.

Many students mistakenly believe that going to China equals immersion, but it can be easily demonstrated that this isn't true. You can create an immersion environment in your home country. It's also perfectly possible to go to China and stay in an expat or tourist bubble, thus only coming into contact with slightly more Chinese than your friends at home. The only significant difference between immersion at home and abroad is that it takes more effort at home.

Improving listening ability through immersion

In this article, I want to focus on the listening part of immersion. Listening ability is a tricky beast. While there are some things to say about how to improve, it's much more about exposure than anything else. You learn to understand Chinese by listening to Chinese, preferably with varied input from different speakers and, once you reach an intermediate level, with different regional accents.

Now, humans are not machines, so most of us can't just program ourselves to listen to Chinese for six hours a day for months or years. If we could, our listening skills would sky-rocket and other skills except handwriting would be dragged up along with it. I'm not going to focus on why it's hard to "just do it" for such an extended time. Instead, I'm going to focus on how to overcome the problem of enabling yours to listen to as much Chinese as you ought to.

Three steps to enable yourself to listen to more Chinese

Finding suitable audio

Making it easy to listen to Chinese

Playing the long game

Finding suitable audio

Let's look at an overview here before we move on to the more interesting second step. In essence, "suitable" means "comprehensible" and "interesting". 

Scroll down a bit and you'll find resource suggestions for different levels.

Making it easy to listen to Chinese

One thing I have learnt on my journey towards a better understanding of how to get things done is that controlling the environment is easier than controlling one's own behaviour, and that it's usually more effective. If you want to do something a lot, say an hour or two every day, the first step you need to take after finding audio is to make sure that it's really easy to listen to it.

Here are some suggestions:

Always have audio available – This is super important. Wherever you are, you should have Chinese audio available to listen to. In the bathroom, when out on a walk, when you learn your friend will be 15 minutes late or when you miss the bus. If at any point you realise that you could have listened to Chinese, but can't because of a practical problem, you make an angel cry.

Transfer audio in advance – If you don't stream audio, you have to transfer audio to your smart phone in advance. Make a habit of managing your audio! Every Sunday or whatever, check what audio you have available, and if it isn't enough to last you at least two weeks, transfer some more. Additionally, keep a folder somewhere in the cloud where you store audio you can download to your phone if need be.

Remove distracting audio – I have already said that you should make it as easy as possible to listen to Chinese, but it also follows that you can do the reverse, i.e. making it harder to listen to audio in any other language. If you listen to a lot of audio in your native language, it might be tempting to listen to that instead. Make it harder to access! You might not want to make it impossible unless you want to go 100% Chinese, though.

Solve any technical issues – This involves bad audio players, faulty earphones or slow connections. If you've made an effort to find audio and make sure it's available when you need it, it doesn't make sense if fail because of technical issues. Have an extra pair of earphones available, buy a separate, cheap mp3 player just for Chinese.

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