Is speaking more important than listening when learning Chinese?

What languages do you speak? Do you speak Chinese?

We often let speaking ability stand for overall language skill and usually don’t inquire about someone’s listening comprehension, likely because we assume that if someone can speak a language well, they can understand it just as well.

Does this mean that speaking is more important when learning Chinese?

Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode #191:

Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!

Visible and invisible language ability

One reason people tend to value speaking ability higher than listening ability is that the former is visible, whereas the latter is often less obvious.

You form an intuitive opinion about someone’s speaking ability as soon as they open their mouth, but to assess someone’s listening ability, you need to actively probe their understanding, preferably through a structured test.

Regularly saying duì (对) or en (嗯) to indicate that you understand, and occasionally asking a question related to the general topic of the conversation does not show that someone understands everything that’s being said.

As we shall see, expressing yourself is easier than understanding what other people say. When you speak yourself, you can control the language you use, the topic you talk about and how quickly you speak, but when you listen, you lack that control.

Listening in Chinese is hard

There are many reasons why listening is harder than speaking beyond a lack of control over language, topic and speed, some of which are extra important for Mandarin. In this article, I listed three reasons:

1. Mandarin has a timed sound inventory – This makes pronunciation and speaking easier once you know the sounds and tones. However, this also means many words sound similar, making listening tough. With around a thousand unique syllables, and even fewer if you haven’t learnt to distinguish tones, students often feel everything sounds the same. This is mainly due to Mandarin’s simple syllable structure, with no consonant clusters in the initials and few allowed finals.
2. Listening in Mandarin is more context-dependent – The world’s languages differ in how they encode information. English words include a lot of often redundant information, so just by seeing the word “her”, you know both that it refers to a female and that she’s the object of the sentence. Languages like Latin are even more extreme in this regard. Chinese, however, is at the opposite end. If you hear the word 她, you need context to figure out if it’s the subject, object, or something else. This makes listening harder because the burden of decoding this information is on the listener.
3. Mandarin comes in many forms – In China, Mandarin is often a second language, spoken with diverse accents and influences from local dialects. This creates a challenge for learners, who must navigate variations in pronunciation and vocabulary. The scale of China’s linguistic diversity, with over a billion speakers, amplifies this challenge, requiring learners to adapt to a wide range of spoken Mandarin forms.

All these factors make listening difficult, not in the sense that it requires a lot of skill or talent to master, but in the sense that there are few shortcuts and no substitute for tons of listening practice.

Why is listening in Chinese so hard?

Showing off speaking ability and faking listening comprehension

The paradox is that while listening ability is harder to learn, it’s also easier to fake. As mentioned, you need to probe actively to see how much someone truly understands, while their ability to express themselves will be immediately obvious.

This is why you should focus on your speaking ability if you want to boast about how quickly you learnt Chinese, but I’m much less impressed by a student who can rattle off native-sounding sentences but doesn’t seem to understand what the people say than vice versa.

Listening ability is much more important than speaking ability

The problem isn’t that I think people actively try to fake speaking ability or hide bad listening comprehension, but that it’s easy to focus on what’s most visible, especially if the environment encourages this.

Don’t do it; listening is more important than speaking!

Speaking ability is mostly about using things you have learnt to express yourself. This requires skill, and practising speaking will improve your ability to communicate.

Real communication: What it is, why you want it and how to get it

The problem is that you can only put new words and grammar into your brain through your ears (or eyes if you’re reading), not your mouth. You need to hear (or see) things over and over in different contexts to learn them; no amount of speaking will be a substitute for this.

Improving your listening ability accelerates your learning

Another reason listening ability is so important is that it accelerates your learning in a way that improving your speaking ability does not

The more you understand what people say, the more you learn. If you don’t understand anything, you won’t learn much, but if you understand some, you stand a chance to learn things you didn’t already know.

Compare two scenarios, one in which you invested a lot of effort into improving your listening comprehension, and one where you used all that time to improve your speaking ability instead, and you then listen to a conversation in Chinese. In the first case, you will understand more of what is said, and thereby also stand a better chance of learning something from the experience. Improving your listening ability gave you extra learning opportunities. In the second case, you might not be able to follow the conversation at all, and listening to it is largely a waste of time.

This is less likely to happen if you study Chinese in your home country and can perfectly control the difficulty of the listening materials you use, but if any listening you engage in is improvised or not tailored to your level, focusing on listening ability will accelerate your learning.

This is similar to the idea that learning many words is important because it opens up new learning opportunities. When you understand most of the words in an utterance, you can learn some of those you didn’t, but if you don’t know any, you probably can’t.

Learning Chinese words: When quantity beats quality

Understanding is often preferable to being able to express yourself

Apart from this, I think that understanding what’s going on is more important for social integration than being able to express yourself.

If you’re in a group of native speakers, it’s hard to fit in or have fun if you don’t understand what people say. It doesn’t help much that your speaking ability is good, because what you say will mostly be monologues unrelated to what other people talk about.

If your listening ability is up to par, on the other hand, you can follow what’s going on and be a part of the group. Sure, your contributions to discussions might be limited to begin with, but that will change gradually. In the meantime, you will learn a ton of Chinese by understanding more of what others say.

Is writing more important than reading?

Even though this article is about speaking and listening, most of the concepts here can also be applied to writing and reading. Active abilities like speaking and writing are more obvious to the listener/reader, whereas passive skills like listening and reading are more indirect.

Still, a good reading/listening ability is the foundation of a good writing/speaking ability, so if you want to build the latter, focus on the former.

For more about improving your writing ability, see 20 tips and tricks to improve your Chinese writing ability

Conclusion: Is speaking more important than listening when learning Chinese?

No.

It’s tempting to focus on speaking when learning a foreign language. I know many beginners who spend a lot of time trying to say the words and use the grammar in their textbooks, but limited time listening to those words in varied, communicative contexts.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with speaking from day one; it’s a great idea, especially if you have an immediate need to be able to speak with people where you live.

But you shouldn’t allow that to overshadow your listening practice. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that only knowledge which you can express counts. You can focus too much on speaking, but there’s no such thing as listening too much!

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in 2014, was rewritten from scratch and massively updated in April, 2024.

---

Tips and tricks for how to learn Chinese directly in your inbox

I've been learning and teaching Chinese for more than a decade. My goal is to help you find a way of learning that works for you. Sign up to my newsletter for a 7-day crash course in how to learn, as well as weekly ideas for how to improve your learning!