Does anyone have suggestions for listening practice? Ideas for an advanced beginner or low intermediate student would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Well, you can listen to the Domino Chinese dialogs. There's a thousand of them. And there is the storytime audio which can be downloaded as mp3s.
I also like to listen to audio books in Chinese. I would recommend some Audible graded reader stories from Mandarin Companion. You can search for them on Amazon. They are not free but don't cost too much. My favourite at the moment is "Sherlock Holmes and the Curly Haired Company". They do several other audio books such as Emma, The Monkeys Paw, The Prince and the Pauper. It's annoying to have to buy the Audible audio, and the Kindle book separately, but I find it very useful to read the Chinese and listen to the spoken story at the same time. If you do also buy an ebook, make sure to choose the Simplified Chinese version, as they also do Traditional Chinese versions!
One thing that is free to listen to is podcasts in Chinese. I use the "Ximalaya" podcast app for phones. The downside is that you obviously don't get a script to check you understood correctly!
Hope that is some help!
Hey John, the ximalaya app sounds quite interesting, but I couldn't find it in the google play store. Could you direct me to the download? Thanks in advance!
Hi Max, well I got it from the Huawei AppGallery, I don't even have google play on my phone!
There seem to be downloads on the Ximalaya (喜马拉雅) website here if you are happy with downloading and installing Android apk files:
https://www.ximalaya.com/download/
otherwise you could try looking in other app stores?
Cheers
John has given some good sources. The Domino dialogues are great.
You don't need the Ximalaya app; you can listen from the website. I avoid apps when possible. I don't want even more trackers on my device.
Thanks I managed to get the app now. You have some podcasts there you enjoy listening to and can reccomend?
Well there are so many different stations on ximalaya I like to just browse. If you want something spoken a bit slower and clearer than normal then maybe check out the 儿童 (children) section.
You can go straight to a channel or show by searching. If you like sci-fi try a listen to 银河少年传说.
You can also check out some comedy routines, try 岳云鹏孙越爆笑相声合辑.
Personally I like the ghost stories, for example 民间鬼故事.
There's so much free audio to listen to. If anyone finds any good shows, please share them here!
Thanks for all the suggestions, I checked the ghost stories out. Currently I'm on level 10 but I don't think my comprehension level is there yet. How far along are you so I get an idea when I'll be able to understand it better? I'm doing fine with the dialogues and the story time so far, but podcasts seem unreachable for me so far...
Beautiful readers with audios. Sample pages and sound on the page. (you can buy them on Amazon)
A bit of honest advice to chip in:
Dating helps 😉
I would strongly recommend a Google Chrome extension called Language Learning with Netflix. It has made it so much simpler for me to learn what the people are saying in the Mandarin shows I watch. It gives you the English, Mandarin characters and Pinyin of every single subtitle. It saves me a lot of time.