I was inspired by a recent forum post to start doing more listening practice (primarily using Anki's "Pronounced Mandarin Chinese Pinyin" deck) and have been a little surprised by the things that are difficult. I should mention that my Chinese study for the last year and half has been 90% Skritter with a little bit of conversation practice and grammar study thrown in, so I am a relative beginner when it comes to listening comprehension.

The Anki deck I'm using plays an audio sample (I think they're even the same samples Skritter uses, the ones with the female speaker) and you're supposed to figure out the pinyin and tone. I set my deck up so I actually have to type in the pinyin and the tone number. This would be an awesome addition to Skritter, hint hint.

The good news is that I get about 85% of them right on the first hearing, and the first and fourth tones are generally easy to identify. This is better than I expected given the relative lack of listening practice I've done; maybe listening passively while practicing on Skritter has done some good. The bad news is that I find certain differences such as yin vs. ying1, can1 vs. zan1, and second tone vs. third tone *extremely* difficult to distinguish even on repeated listening. Part of it is probably the particular speaker; listening to other samples like these, I hear the differences more clearly:

http://www.archchinese.com/arch_pinyin_table.html

I wonder if some of the more experienced Chinese students have any advice on learning to distinguish troublesome sounds. Naturally I plan on continuing the listening and dictation practice I'm doing, but I wonder if there are other study techniques out there that people have found useful.

James

Sounds like all you need is a bit more practice. Considered finding yourself a Skype 'teacher' to chat to? Wont cost much. Perhaps $5-7 an hour?

"I wonder if some of the more experienced Chinese students have any advice on learning to distinguish troublesome sounds."

Not to be flippant, but you could try getting high. Something as simple as drinking tea or coffee -- if you aren't already -- can help you notice nuances that bypassed you before. It will also make the experience more enjoyable.

I’ve just checked with Skritter. I found that the pronunciations of the characters因 、银、引、印 by the female speaker are problematic. The position of the articulation is too backward so that they are very similar to an ‘ng’ sound.

I can’t see any problem with ‘can’ or ‘zan’. To me, 餐 and 簪 are very distinct. What I can say is that ‘c’ is aspirated while ‘z’ is not.

For the second tone vs. third tone problem, are you aware of the sandhi rule that says that when two third tones come together, the first one is changed to a second tone. For example, the character 手 in 手指 is pronounced as a second tone?

@icecream I'm not sure where you're from, but "getting high" doesn't mean "drink a caffeinated beverage" where I come from... ;) I already drink way too much caffeine, BTW.

@pts That's very interesting. I just reviewed those characters in the scratchpad and in my deck, and they are definitely the same samples. Could it be that the woman pronouncing them has some kind of regional accent?

As for tone sandhi, my dictation practice uses single syllables so it doesn't apply.

Those character syllables are all coming from ChinesePod.

I don't think we'll be doing characterless-prompting, James--that would be tough. At most you could find a bunch of rare characters you don't know the pinyins for, do reading practice, and hit the audio button to hear it without seeing the pinyin. Probably just easier to do it in Anki, though. Probably the easiest thing is to just manually practice only the tough syllables in a chart like you linked earlier, but you've already set Anki up.

James,

I recently moved to Sichuan, where people (old people especially) do not speak with standard pronunciation. 牛 sounds like 刘, 是 sounds like 四, 子 sounds like 止, and the list goes on.

What has helped tremendously is lots and lots of listening. Talking to Chinese people face to face is for me the best way. There are others. Though I don't like TV, I'll watch news or other programs subbed in Chinese while I eat. I listen to Chinese podcasts while I Skritter. Watching subbed videos on Youku or Tudou is great too; they often have subtitles and you can pause at those tricky spots ('yin' and 'ying'; 'can' and 'zan') to listen again and again.

Imagine you're typing SMS in Chinese and a Chinese person walks up to you and says, "你会拼音啊？". His 音 may sound like 应. But from context you (and your ears) will know the difference.

Listening to tones in isolation can be useful. Yet there's still the matter of China's myriad of dialects and accents. Even if you learn every Chinese tone and syllable individually (and do it perfectly) that doesn't guarantee an ability to hear it in context. My recommendation is to listen to more real world material, i.e. conversation practice and material intended for a Chinese audience. You'll understand more of what you hear than you realize.

Thanks for all the comments. I went over some of the problematic sounds with my 北京人 tutor today and he said he couldn't hear the difference between 英 and 音 or between second and third tone either. :P He said Chinese people just figure it out from context.

So it proved that the sound files are not up to standard. Thank you.

About the tone, the problem lies with the second or the third tone? Which specific character has problem or all second tones or all third tones have problem? I just get very interested.

BTW, do you have a URL for the sound files from ChinesePod? I want to download them into Anki and make some tests, as it is very inefficient to test with Skritter.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I didn't play the sound files for him; I showed him the characters and he said that for him, the sounds of 英 and 音 were identical.

I don't have a direct link for the ChinesePod sounds. What I'm using are the sound files which came with Anki's "Pronounced Mandarin Chinese Pinyin" deck (look for it under "Downloads->Shared Decks".

Shared Anki decks are handy. This is the original source:
http://chinesepod.com/tools/pronunciation

Downloaded the shared deck and played with it for a while. I think you should concentrate on the pitch of the sound. A high pitch means the first or fourth tone. The medium pitch is the second tone. A low pitch indicates the third tone. Looking up the 普通话水平测试实施纲要, the comment for the third tone (上声) is “发音过程中，声音主要表现在低音段 1-2 度之间，这成为上声的基本特征。” So the basic characteristic of the third tone is its low pitch. Hope this help.

Thanks, I will try that. I think I can generally get them when I pay specific attention to the tone, but when I'm distracted by another issue (c vs. t vs. z, or sh vs. x) my tone discrimination suffers. First and fourth tone are much easier.