听写练习

I’ve been learning some dialogues, and although I’ve gotten reasonably good at learning characters and their meanings and how to read them, two of the things I’m still not very good at are remembering how to write them. And how to learn a dialogue.

你女儿毕业了吧？

是啊，毕业差不多两年了。

现在在哪儿上班呢？

在我们家附近的一个医院，当医生。

男的的女儿是做什么的？

Dictation in Word is really struggling, perhaps my pronunciation and tones, but I think that there’s an issue here with the document being in English, because as I’m speaking in Chinese for the dictation, it’s putting down English words and then recognising they’re Chinese only afterwards. So perhaps I should create a new Word document and set the language in that document to Mainland Chinese, and then try dictating into that to see if there’s a difference. Excuse me just a moment, folks.

These are short dialogues from HSK four listening tests. One of the things that has taken me slightly unaware is that in HSK one through three, you can listen to each dialogue twice. Usually you pick up some of it the first time and then you can focus on the bits that you missed or didn’t understand the second time through. In HSK 4, it includes all of the previous content and some more vocabulary, but you also only listen once, which of course is much more like what happens in real life where you would need to ask someone to repeat themselves.

To study this material together, my teacher first asks me to take the test. So I listen to the dialogue. She shows me the answers. And recently she stopped. She stopped telling me what the answers mean. So the first part of the test is actually reading because I need to be able to read both the questions and the answers. So for example, here the answers might be a series of professions, and then one of the questions might be what is the man’s daughter doing now?

What is quite reassuring is that I went away and I set up a new Word document and I set the proofing language in that document to mainland Chinese. Then I flipped the language on my dictation app over to mainland Chinese as well, and then really didn’t struggle very much to dictate through the sentences. That’s that’s a big relief because if a machine thinks that I’m speaking intelligible Chinese and I’m probably not that far off.

My teacher tells me that learning these sentences and then the toolkit that they represent is absolutely critical for this stage of my learning. So take one of these sentences, Like has your daughter graduated yet? You can exchange parts of this sentence for other pieces. For example, you could change daughter for son or friend or wife or husband. So this is a toolkit. It’s something that I can use to build other sentences. Once I’ve learned it once, I can then rebuild it based on the conversations I want to have. And then although it’s about graduating, it could be about learning to swim or anything else. So that you go. That’s where I am in terms of my Chinese study.