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Post-Advanced Introduction to Ximalaya

Lesson Suggestion
#1

Suggested Difficulty (Elementary etc): Post-Advanced
Video or Audio: Either
Lesson Idea: Hi @Constance_Fang and Team,

I would suggest a Post-Advanced level on ChinesePod, and a major purpose could be to help the transition to various forms of materials made for native speakers.

For example, a whole series could be done introducing us to the vast riches of audiobooks that can be found on Ximalaya. Even though I’ve heard hundreds of chapters there, just looking at the website still makes my head spin! What is all that stuff anyway? Help!

ChinesePod was built to be a nest where us poor weak learners of Chinese could be nursed along, and then spread our wings and fly into the vast and exciting world of Chinese media. But it seems some of us (myself included!) could use a good kick out of the nest to help us fly on our own.

#2

Hi Elijah,

It is a real pleasure to meet you through Chiinesepod. When I read your comment, I thought about my father throwing my siblings and me into the pool when he first taught us how to swim. He wasn’t a swimming coach, but he really had such a way to “throw” us into situations where he expected us to handle on our own.

So now I imagine Ximalaya is the sea which fascinates you but every time you come to it, you just dip your toe in. I would love to explore the Ximalaya with you. What do you see as “click easy”, i.e. tabs that attract you to click? What tabs most certainly put you off? Furthermore, is it the Chinese characters that hinder you? After all, it’s laborious to read Chinese even if you know 1000 characters. Maybe you have already achieved an advanced level of listening comprehension, but reading competency is moving forward? I know that you have a HSK 6 level (hurray!!), and so you are well on your way to go beyond the testing content of the Chinese language.

If you are a novel person, then I would highly recommend the novel section on Ximalaya. It may seem obvious to us that media topics are more relevant and therefore “more useful” and therefore “easier” for CSL learners to use to learn Chinese. But I have my reservation here; language learning is a process of internalization, and media (I take you to mean news, movies, social media stuff) is not meant for that. Language use in media is generally expressive and is far more removed from our inner voice. When you are reading a piece of news, or watching a movie, you are not necessarily internalising the language because you are seeing your counterparts (the actors or news reporters) expressing something (most of the time in either very dramatic or condense form). You are expected to RECEIVE the content, but what if your internal Chinese content is not sufficient to match the content thrown at you? Same as when you are a beginning swimming, the water is just too much for your psyche (and less for your body). Therefore when we read or listen to it in our second language, we may not be receiving the sound/meaning because we have either never heard of the word/phrase/accent or we cannot register a quantity as a native can. It is therefore a necessity for high level CSL learners as you to read more texts that can be more readily and easily absorbed. Novels fit right for this purpose. Novels are written to touch the reader’s inner chord, and so when you read a serious novel in a second language and can comprehend and generate feelings, you know that the language is internalised.

Novel is a beautiful and scenic genre of the Chinese language you probably have the proficiency to enjoy and enrich your proficiency and no doubt get you closer and closer to reach your media goal.

But Elijah, I would love to understand more about what you have in mind in terms of exploring the Ximalaya site, what is your ideal format? With one host pointing and explaining the website from section by section? Or two hosts in a talking format to do “editorial pick” and discuss? Please do not hesitate to advise us!

And we welcome all comments from all of our users!

Regards,
Elsha

#3

Wow, thanks a lot for sharing this resource. Of course, it will be many years before I can make use of it, but knowing it exists is great. I’ve just bookmarked it.

I do use audiobooks a lot for the languages where I’m already an advanced student; for example, for Dutch, reading and listening to audiobooks has meant a huge progress for me and one of the best tools to pass from an intermediate to an advanced level. I find the most useful thing for me is to combine reading the e-book with listening to the audio (I do that for Dutch using both the free e-books in librivox, which has lots of other languages as well, and a paying service called Book Choice). I hope to do that for Chinese in the future too.

A suggestion for post-advanced resources:

I had a look a few days ago at the MOOCs on Coursera and edx which were offered in Mandarin. There are quite a few, apart from the language courses, on various topics, all of them entirely in Mandarin, offered by Chinese universities, and with subtitles and transcripts. That could be a useful resource for advanced students like you. They are on many different topics, like Literature (there is one on the Story of the Stone for example), Chinese history, Business, etc.

1 Like
#4

Elsha,

Yes, a big obstacle everywhere is characters. I know at least 2,000, and have a vocabulary of about 20,000, but it’s still not nearly enough. On top of that, even when I know all the characters, I still often have no idea what the title and description of the book means.

The bigger issue is that I’m really picky about audio, and I’m always looking for something that sounds like a blockbuster movie. Excellent acting, music and sound effects really help me to pay attention and enjoy what I’m hearing, even when I’m having trouble following it.

I’ve heard the following books, and was quite happy with the quality: All of 我当阴阳先生的那几年, and most of 刘慈欣短篇集 .

Both of those were done by kting北京东方视角. They used to have their own website and excellent app, but for some reason all their content was taken down and moved to Ximalaya.

On one of my tutor’s recommendations, I tried a chapter of 盗墓笔记, but it was incredibly discouraging. Even looking at the text, it was filled with characters I didn’t know, and even the dialogue was barely understandable. Also, it sounded like this recording only had one actor, which likely would not interest me long-term.

I’ll give some more thought to what I’d like to see in a Ximalaya series, and come back and write more.

#5

Looking forward Elijah!

#6

If you are specifically looking for audiobooks on Ximalaya, have you tried either searching for a favourite author, or for a book/author you’ve seen recommended/read about elsewhere? I do this with Welsh books, where I’m fluent enough to read the books, but still struggle to parse all the words when confronted with a wall of blurbs and lists of titles vying for your attention like you get on a publisher’s website. Basically I can’t quite browse for something interesting, but I can scan for something specific. :slight_smile:

If the problem is finding books of a suitable level, have you tried easing yourself in by searching for and reading/listening to books you already now in English / another languange? It’s amazing how much knowing the plot helps to make sense of new words!

#7

Hands down on “knowing the plot to help make sense of new words! We do so much of that in our mother tongue (English especially), and we feel comfortable to do it because using the context clue method is taught and encouraged. So I would encourage advanced learners to be brave and take a guess at some “seemingly” impossible cluster phrase. This way you are applying both your grammatical knowledge and contextual knowledge to improve on your reading skill which becomes a literary activity and not just learning by word definitions. I would love to discuss more on the difference of reading comprehension and literary comprehension, if you are interested!

#8

The movie of 流浪地球 is coming soon!