"This is really easy," Gail said. After two months producing intermediate listening tests, she sounded almost disappointed by the lack of challenge, A bit like Tiger Woods shuffling his way through a senior's golf tournament."It's a listening test for beginners," I replied, "it's supposed to be easy. And besides, you're a native speaker. Understanding spoken Chinese isn't a walk in the park for people when they've just started learning." Neither is speaking, reading or writing, but I left those out. Alice had fled down the rabbit hole: we were consoling our test prep team. "You never know," I tried to cheer her up, "maybe everyone on the site has worse Chinese than you think.""No, it's pretty straightforward," she insisted. "Unless someone is struggling with hello they should do OK. But we'll put it up and see." She paused. "If anyone fails the first question I think you should ban them. That one's a giveaway.""We'll think about it...."
swigr
said on November 16, 2008
Well Ｉ ｈｏｐｅ Ｉ won't be banned. At least I can blame my score on the questions showing up on as a mix of traditional and simplified characters.
HSK Beginner
said on November 16, 2008
You didn't get question #1 wrong, did you?
Looks like the simplified->traditional conversion script on the server has a bug in it - I'm getting some of the questions showing up in simplified too. Will take a look. thx.
trevelyan
said on November 16, 2008
@swigr - the conversion issue should be fixed by the way. thanks for pointing it out. --dave
swigr
said on November 17, 2008
No, I didn't get question #1 wrong but still it's very depressing to not ace this test.
trevelyan
said on November 17, 2008
Gail will be happy at least. If she follows up we'll tell her everyone was moaning over how difficult it was.
BMG
said on November 21, 2008
Sorry to disappoint Gail. Maybe you can tell her the ego boost will help some of us to stay the course. After getting battered at intermediate level sometimes it's nice to have a reminder of the progress I have made.
Besides, not too long ago this would have been a real challenge for me. Especially 13-15. I felt really good to get through those unscathed.
trevelyan
said on November 21, 2008
@BMG - we just told her to make the next round of Advanced listening tests particularly grinding. ;)
nadasax
said on May 14, 2009
the questions themselves are not difficult, i got 15/15, but the male voice especially is so fast and the pronunciation is incredibly unclear...even slowed down to half speed there are times where what he says is totally incomprehensible... i think its neccessary to remember that while authenticity is great, STUDENTS need voice tracks that they can follow and learn correct clear pronunciation from... i've noticed this on other tracks as well, where the voice is so native/garbled that its utterly non-understandable...like i said, this includes even slowing it down to half-speed digitally... i personally would like to hear a bit more attention given to making sure dialogues, especially at the absolute beginner and elementary levels, are TOTALLY clear in phonetic and tonal pronunciation...they don't have to go in slow motion but they should be clear and well pronounced/enunciated both phonetically and tonally...if i could understand native Beijingers talking at 100% native full-speed i wouldn't need to be studying ;)
Echo
said on May 14, 2009
@nadasax,
Thank you for your suggestions :)
We have thought about that too and already made the voice tracks in the recent listening tests clearer.
However, I have different opinions about the lessons. We have been working on giving students the real dialogues which ordinary Chinese people are actually using on the street everyday. I am sure English native speakers would not pronounce every single word perfectly and clearly when they speak English in their daily lives either, but this is the real and natural way people speak. The last thing we want is that our listeners have learned from Popupchinese for a year, but when they come to Beijing they can not understand anything waitresses say. However, the voice actors we picked all graduated from broadcasting schools or drama schools, and they can speak clear and standard Mandarin , which is very important to us and to our listeners :) Besides that, for Beginner and Elementary levels, we often have one slow speed repetition when Brendan and I translate the dialogues line by line. For my perspective, I think it is important for the students can hear both natural speak and the slow version.
I don't know what other users think, and hopefully I can see your opinions here. Thanks:)
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
nadasax
said on May 14, 2009
@echo i appreciate your perspective, however there are realistic considerations to be made... first thing is level appropriateness- in advanced and some intermediate lessons full-speed street-natural Beijing-dialectic chinese is surely appropriate... at the absolute beginner level, where people may be in their first few months or even first few weeks of ever having heard mandarin chinese in their entire life, i think the focus should be on understandability and building a solid foundation for the new learners...remember, what may seem beyond elementary to you can be quite new and difficult to new-comers... also, the idea of natural- for example in listening to the short story "Cats" the speaker is using a normal speed natural voice but every detail is clear...also i stream CCTV off the web and i can hear the syllable's and words clearly even when i don't follow the meaning... i think you can use a stair-step method where for sure you present realistic situations in common speach where the dialogue is still clearly pronounced, this is especially important for an aural model of how WE should be saying words... its true that people in everyday speech often slur or even mis-pronounce words but we as natives understand anyway, however this is not a good basis for building an idea of how a language sounds...i doubt that you listened to street people from the bronx or the deep mississipi south when you were in the first few months of studying english once upon a time, and i doubt when you were six months old you understood all the chinese around you... you family spoke to you slowly and clearly because you were a baby and still learning...so are we =) you could even have a seperate section specifically for "street real" pronunciation, but we absolute beginners need to build a solid foundation of standard mandarin pronunciation off of which we can learn to catch the variations of common street speach... you don't give someone who's never shot a bow-and-arrow a moving target their first time... i love the site, love the ideas, love the spirit, and i think there's a place for everything, but i think the beginning needs to be the beginning... we need to hear the phonetics, the tones, and have a model we can follow to learn how to say things correctly with standard pronunciation before we start to get into the details of local native dialect... your general philosophy is right on but a bit more understanding of exactly what we beginners are up against would be great... again, overall...awesome site =)
trevelyan
said on May 15, 2009
@nadasax - thought provoking post. there is method to our madness for lesson categorization. it would be good to have a discussion about that. we certainly don't claim to have all the answers. should write up a blog post about this.we do have some exciting plans for better helping users start "from scratch" that we'll be able to share soon. i don't disagree with anything you've said and there is always room to improve. stepwise direction is clearly important for total beginners and your comments aren't going into the void. :)
nadasax
said on May 15, 2009
:) yea its cool...i know you guys have a monumental job with many competing reasons and points of views for this and that- all correct from certain perspectives...its not meant to be criticism in the negative sense...
i value the work you do that helps me learn better and faster and all the time you take to answer questions etc 等等。。。
same time as someone who likes this site if i can throw something out that might be helpful to all- no harm in offering it...
as a final (I SWEAR!=) metaphor, think of it like hand-writing- you don't present the written text visually in somebody's jotted down handwriting despite the fact that it might be how people actually write day to day in china, you use standard clear readable fonts...same idea for the beginner oriented aural presentation of the voices...thats all ;)
你们都“摇滚”哈哈 =）
tedge.71
said on October 26, 2010
These comments were very helpful for me. I didn't ace this test like I thought I would. I live in New York and I can assure you almost no one here sounds like the "Beijingers". We,collectively Chinese and Americans, make them lighten up on their accent so we can understand them. Probably isn't so great if we want to go to Beijing but in New York, when time is money. We don't have patience for the "authentic" sound.
BTW, I love this sight. You are way better than the schools here.
