Most learners struggle with listening comprehension. The advice to “listen more” is correct, but it also matters how you listen. You build listening ability by making sense of spoken Mandarin, not by listening to people using English to describe words and grammar.
Start by listening more, because listening ability is, to a large extent, a matter of practice. Listening more speeds up the processing of language you already know and provides data about how the language is used by native speakers.
Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#310).
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You are probably not listening as much as you think you are
Many learners think they listen a lot, but actually don’t. There are several reasons for this, first among them the fact that we humans are not very good at retroactively estimating the duration of events and tallying up study time retroactively.
Write down how much you listen. Keep a language log for a week to see if you listen as much as you think you are.
For some guidelines on how much you actually should listen, see How much Chinese should you listen to every day?
Only listening to Chinese counts as listening practice
But there is another problem too, and it is easier to miss. Some activities that seem like listening practice don’t count. It’s not pressing the play button with earphones on that will teach you Chinese; you have to actually listen to Chinese.
If a podcast episode is 30 minutes long, but only 3 minutes are in Chinese and 27 in English, you have done 3 minutes of listening practice, not 30. And it’s probably not very good listening practice at that.
This matters because many beginner podcasts use way too much English. The hosts are friendly. The explanations are clear. The lesson is structured. You understand everything, which feels good, especially if Chinese normally feels overwhelming.
The problem is that this won’t improve your listening ability much.
The people who make these podcasts are often trying to make Chinese approachable, and that is a reasonable goal. A podcast like this can motivate learners, reduce anxiety and give people a first glimpse of what Chinese is like.
But as listening practice, it’s terrible.
30 minutes of podcast, 3 minutes of Chinese
The numbers I use in this article (30 minutes of podcast, 3 minutes of Chinese) aren’t pulled out of a hat. When looking for suitable listening content for The Fluent Listener, I listened to hundreds of learner podcast episodes
My goal here is not to attack a specific podcast or episode, nor is it to criticise specific teachers or hosts. Thus, I will describe a general pattern common in beginner podcasts: mostly English discussion, with occasional Chinese words and phrases introduced and explained in English.
I chose one specific episode to analyse in detail. For context, it’s about travel in China in general and trains in particular.
So, what did the numbers look like for this episode?
30 minutes of podcast, 3 minutes of Chinese.
If your goal is to listen to two hours of Chinese per week, and this is the kind of material you use, then you need to listen to a total of 20 hours of audio per week.
I’m not saying that this kind of podcast is completely useless, but you need to be clear about what the purpose of listening to it is.
What should a learning activity do?
When evaluating a learning activity, the question is not whether it teaches Chinese in some vague sense, but what kind of learning it supports. For example, an activity might:
- help you understand meaning through Chinese, such as listening to or reading something where the language itself carries the message
- let you practise using Chinese yourself to express opinions, information, and so on
- focus on form, such as explanations of words, grammar or pronunciation, or help you practise these directly in various ways
- make you better at what you already know (faster, smoother, with less effort, more effectively and so on)
A good learning routine contains a mix of these, but each activity should still have a clear purpose. For a more detailed way of thinking about this balance, see Analyse and balance your Chinese learning with Paul Nation’s four strands.
Analyse and balance your Chinese learning with Paul Nation’s four strands
So what does a podcast which is 90% in English train?
It is clearly not speaking or writing practice. It is also not fluency development, because these podcasts are clearly designed to teach you new words (they introduce words as if they are new and explain what they mean and sometimes how they are used). Fluency development is about getting better at what you already know.
That leaves two possible functions:
- It’s meaning-focused listening, where you make sense of spoken Chinese.
- It’s language-focused learning, where you study words and grammar explicitly
Let’s look at them both in turn.
3 minutes of listening, and none of it is focused on meaning
We’ve already discussed that it doesn’t make sense to listen to a 30-minute episode to get 3 minutes of listening practice, but the way Chinese is often used in these podcasts also highlights a bigger problem common in learning materials at lower levels: the Chinese is not actually needed.
A common pattern is for the hosts to lead with English. For example, they might ask how to say “train station” in Chinese before giving the Chinese word, then talk about it a bit more in English. In other places, the Chinese comes first and is then immediately translated or explained. Both patterns occur, but the result is similar: the English does all the communicative work.
You understand Chinese, but understanding is achieved by translation, not by listening.
This disqualifies the activity as meaning-focused practice, so that leaves language-focused learning.
Does it work as language-focused learning?
Maybe we should not evaluate this type of podcast mainly as listening practice or input. Maybe it is better understood as explicit instruction: vocabulary, grammar and cultural notes.
That is a fairer interpretation, and this type of podcast does have some value here. You can learn that 火车 (huǒchē) means train, that 票 (piào) means ticket, and maybe something about Chinese-specific things such as hard seats and soft seats or train travel in China in general. If your goal is to get a feel for what travelling in China is like, this kind of podcast can be useful.
But that is learning about Chinese, or learning about China, mostly in English.
As form-focused learning, the format is still inefficient. Words are introduced, but not practised enough or used in context. Grammar is explained, but not reinforced. There is little retrieval, little variation and not much recycling. The learner mostly follows an English explanation and occasionally hears a Chinese example.
Teaching you something is not good enough
Some of you might feel that I’m being too harsh here. Is this type of learning completely useless? What if it boosts confidence, teaches an occasional useful word here and there and sparks an interest to learn more?
I think all those things are valuable. My goal here is not to stop you from doing things you find useful, but to help you analyse the situation correctly. If you want motivation and low-friction learning is what you want, even if it won’t teach you as much as other methods, this kind of podcast can help.
But if you want to improve your Chinese, the question isn’t whether this kind of podcast is useful, but whether there are better things to spend your time on.
What you should listen to instead
The alternative is not doing nothing. The alternative is listening to something with more Chinese in it.
Even if a more Chinese-heavy podcast is harder, it gives you far more bang for your buck. For starters, you can listen to a beginner podcast that contains more than 10% Chinese. Here are some suggestions:
- The best podcasts for learning Chinese
- The best YouTube channels for learning Chinese
- The 10 best free Chinese listening resources for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners
You could also listen to a short graded dialogue several times. You could listen to something where the same words occur again and again in context. You could use material where understanding depends on paying attention to the Chinese, not waiting for the English explanation.
It used to be hard to find beginner-friendly listening content in Chinese, but that’s no longer the case.
Count time with Chinese, not time with headphones
If you want to improve your listening ability, increase the time you spend trying to make sense of spoken Mandarin at your level, without relying too much on English.
This distinction matters most at the beginner level, where many resources are designed to feel safe and comprehensible by using lots of English. There might be good reasons to use English, but the more English there is, the less Chinese listening you are doing.
That does not mean you should only use learning materials only in Chinese, it just means that when you don’t, you should know why and where it slots into your overall strategy.
30 minutes of podcast, 0 minutes of Chinese
A good example of this is Hacking Chinese. This article is in English. You are clearly not learning any Chinese by reading it. Similarly, my podcast is in English; I’m not even trying to teach you Chinese.
But clearly, that isn’t the goal, and I trust that most of you understand that.
The problem with podcasts that purport to teach you Chinese but contain 90% English is that you might feel like you should be able to learn a lot from them, but you won’t.
Listen mostly to Chinese, not to people who talk about Chinese
So, if you want to learn Chinese, you should spend time engaging directly with Chinese, not listening to people talking about Chinese in English.
Spending 30 minutes to get 3 minutes of bad listening practice simply isn’t worth it.
