Listening

I think listening is probably the most important skill of all. It’s a gateway to all other skills. Reading is also important, but listening even more so, because whereas it’s difficult for most people to fill their days with reading, it’s fairly easy to fill our lives with Chinese audio. The better our listening ability gets, the more we get out of listening. We can extract vocabulary from what we hear, we can learn how words are used in context and we can polish our understanding of Chinese pronunciation.

I have written a lot about listening ability, but some articles are more important than others. To begin with, I’ve written a series of articles about listening ability, containing the following articles.

Listening strategies

Introduction
Problem analysis
Background listening
Passive listening
Active listening
Listening speed
Deliberate practice i+2 and
Social and motivational aspects (not yet published)
Indirect ways of improving listening ability (not yet published)
Audio resources (not yet published)

Apart from these articles, there are also others that focus directly on specific aspects of listening ability.

Articles directly related to listening ability

Listening ability, a matter of practice?
Make sure listening isn’t a practical problem
Listening to the listener
How to find more time to practise listening
Triggering quantum leaps in listening ability

Articles indirectly related to listening ability

The importance of knowing many words
Pros and cons with travelling to learn a language
Diversified learning is smart learning
Benchmarking progress to stay motivated
Reading manga for more than just pleasure
Mapping the terra incognita of vocabulary
Can you become fluent in Chinese in three months?
The 10,000 hour rule – Blood, sweat and tears

A complete list of all articles about listening ability (scroll down to see all of them in a text-only list):

All articles
The importance of knowing many words
Listening ability, a matter of practice?
Pros and cons with travelling to learn a language
A smart method to discover problems with tones
Diversified learning is smart learning
Make sure listening isn’t a practical problem
Listening to the listener
How to find more time to practise listening
Benchmarking progress to stay motivated
Triggering quantum leaps in listening ability
Can you become fluent in Chinese in three months?
Understanding regionally accented Mandarin
The 10,000 hour rule – Blood, sweat and tears
Listening strategies: An introduction
Listening strategies: Problem analysis
Listening strategies: Background listening
Listening strategies: Passive listening
Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2: Playing computer games in Chinese
Listening strategies: Active listening
Listening strategies: Improving listening speed
Listening strategies: Deliberate practice and i+2
Listening strategies: Diversify your listening practice
Why learning Chinese through music is underrated
Learning Chinese with StarCraft 2
12 songs to learn Chinese and expand your horizons
A guide to Pinyin traps and pitfalls
Vocalise more to learn more Chinese
13 more songs to learn Chinese and expand your horizons
RTI, my favourite radio station
Measurable progress is a double-edged sword
The Cthulhu bubble and studying Chinese
14 extra songs to learn Chinese and expand your horizons
Using Audacity to learn Chinese (speaking and listening)