Recommendations: Good resources for improving Chinese/language listening

In My Humble Opinion
1

There are lots of great resources for learning Chinese vocabulary and/or reading in a fairly painless way (Pleco, Anki, Pimsleur, Melnyk’s etc).

But listening I’m finding tougher. Most learning resources, when they’re speaking Chinese you already know what they’re going to say. Or it’s just an unstructured recording followed by some explanation.

I’m looking for something that tests my ability to understand spoken chinese. Even just random spoken lines in Chinese followed by their translation in English would be extremely useful for me. Better yet would be an app where I can score myself.

Anything like that exist?

2

Can you find some Chinese movies, or Chinese TV programs, subtitled in English? Of course, you might want to avoid those from Hong Kong, since they might be in Cantonese. However, I’ve found that watching a lot of anime helps me understand some spoken Japanese.

3

I’ll give it a try. I might download separate subtitle track then put in a time offset (so I try to guess what was said first, then see the “answer”)

Still would be nice to have something I could just listen to while doing chores or whatever. Bit of a gap in the learning materials market…

4

Maybe look up speeches by Chinese politicians, CEOs, etc. on YouTube.

5

When I was learning Chinese in Taiwan, TV soap operas were excellent. The hammy acting means the speech is usually clearly articulated, you can guess what’s going on to some extent, and they have Chinese subtitles so that you can see the characters for words that you don’t know.

6

Thanks all. I’m also thinking of playing through some voice-heavy RPGs (e.g. skyrim) in Chinese with Hanzi subtitles. Can’t hurt.

7

I’ve been trying popupchinese out. I also have been watching some of this youtube channel: A Laowai’s View of China and Taiwan. Currently I’ve been using Pimsleur as well. We’ll see how well any of these are working when I head to Taiwan next week and try to see if I’m any better than my last trip.

8

ARC has a couple which are Chinese, I think that would be better than something translated.

9

Watching with English subtitles is a bad idea. Your brain will just read the subtitles. You may pick up some minor, common things, but the subs will dominate.

Tofugu has an excellent guide to learning Japanese from Anime, and the same principles should apply to Chinese.

The idea is to watch the show in the target language with subtitles from that language. Then you actually open the subtitles file and read it (making notes and opening dictionaries as needed). Finally, you watch the show again, and read the subtitles out loud along with the characters (to develop a sense for the flow and tones in the language), rewinding as necessary if you mess up.