Learning Chinese covers four main areas: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. With limited time, focusing on short-term goals helps. While many start with speaking and listening, true progress requires building a strong foundation in listening. Here’s why:
Listening Takes Time:
From my ten years of experience, very few students are naturally gifted in listening. Many who give up in the first semester do so because poor listening skills make it hard to understand and respond, leading to frustration.
Chinese Tones are Hard:
Without a lot of audio input early on, distinguishing between tones—especially the third and fourth—is tough. I’ve taught students who had been living in Taiwan for a few years; they didn’t know many words but progressed quickly. Why? A strong foundation of Chinese input allowed them to catch subtle tonal differences easily, making listening and speaking natural. With structured teaching, their progress doubled.
Quick Response Needed:
Unlike reading or writing, where you have time to think, listening requires quick understanding. In real life, you can’t often ask others to repeat themselves multiple times.
Varied Accents and Speeds:
Practicing listening early builds flexibility for different accents and clarity levels.Want to know how different regional accents sound? You can check out this website for reference.
Therefore, I believe listening skills should receive extra focus in the early stages of learning. Want to know how to improve listening? Check out the next article.
