Improve your Chinese listening skills in 5 minutes
Trying to learn Chinese in 5 minutes is a trendy concept.
I began studying Chinese in 2015. It took me three years to pass the Chinese HSK Level 3 exam. That arguably puts you “half the way” to becoming fluent in Chinese (the HSK exam has 6 levels).
The good news is that there are now many so many great tools for helping you to learn Chinese. For this article, I’ll focus on the best tools to improve your Chinese listening skills based on my learnings.
Mandarin Corner
Mandarin Corner is a pretty well-known YouTube channel that offers everything from vocabulary basics to podcasts. That said, their “slow stories” are a bit harder to find than some of their other uploads. But the slow stories are one of the best ways to improve your Chinese listening skills. The visual guide that plays during the slow stories offers a great tool to also enhance your reading skills as well as your listening ability.
Yabla
If there’s one takeaway from this 5-minute article, it’s that you are made aware of Yabla Chinese. Yabla is similar to the slow stories on Mandarin Corner, but instead of telling stories or folktales, it focuses mainly on conversations and interviews. You can rewind and slow down what is being said on Yabla, allowing you to listen at your own pace. I feel like Yabla has fallen a bit under the radar. While it costs around $5 a month and it isn’t free, it is a great tool for advanced beginners or intermediate Chinese learners looking to polish up their listening skills. There are dozens of videos, so it’s hard to get old. There are four free videos to start, which will get you familiar with the program.
Yoyo Chinese
Offering everything from reading practice to vocabulary lessons, YoYo Chinese is likely the most comprehensive site on this list. It is also the most expensive. If you’ve studied Chinese for roughly six months, the YoYo Chinese Upper-Intermediate course is a great way to start building your listening skills. In my experience, it begins relatively easily, but increases in difficulty rather quickly. It will immerse you in everyday conversations, taking you along a simulated journey with the host YangYang Chang. The strength of the course is in providing additional context to what you are listening to, so you begin to develop a deeper understanding of the Chinese language.
Asian Crush
No, Asian Crush is not a Chinese dating site. Asian Crush is a free streaming site that allows you to watch Chinese movies and TV shows for free. A couple of friends with who I’ve studied Chinese have sworn by Netflix. They watch Chinese shows strictly to learn Mandarin (and, hey, maybe for the juicy storylines).
Watching Chinese soap operas, romantic comedies, or otherwise “simple” shows is a great way to improve your Chinese listening. Many basic phrases are repeated on shows of this nature, and one can begin to develop a better understanding of some of the most popular Chinese phrases.
So this is close to a quick 5-minute rundown on where and how to improve your Chinese listening skills. If you have 5 minutes a day, you could reasonably use these resources to build a foundation as a Chinese student. In my opinion, spending 5 minutes a day on the above is a better refresher and will help to “tune the ear” for those who have a foundation in place.
A few other listening guides you will run across that I don’t particularly recommend, but that I have used are Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone. Personally, I feel like both of those are too expensive given the free or more affordable Chinese language listening resources listed above. Pimsleur will be upwards of $400, while Rosetta Stone is usually around $300. Pimsleur is a bit dated and is very heavy on getting you to understand and repeat basic phrases. Rosetta Stone is likely just too for the basic pedagogy it provides and it doesn’t offer anything I don’t feel YoYo Chinese or even Mandarin Corner offers.
But no matter which program you decide to start with, I believe it is most helpful to understand why you want to learn Chinese before spending real money.
