Image credit: Bartek Ambrozik
Have you ever finished an exam and felt that you could have done better? Have you ever felt annoyed at your teacher for correcting your pronunciation and adding a long explanation about what you did wrong, even though you know exactly what you should have done, you just slipped? Have you ever had someone correct your typos as if they were real errors that need fixing?
Feedback always needs to be considered in the light of how close to your best performance you were when listening/speaking/reading/writing Chinese. A test sloppily done tells us that you are sloppy, not how good your Chinese is. Your best performance in Chinese is the highest level you can achieve with the knowledge and ability you have at any given time. It might not be immediately obvious why this is important so please let me explain.
Your best performance and why it matters
Your best performance is of paramount importance because it should be a cornerstone of your study plan. If you don’t know your best performance, you don’t know your current position and thus can’t plot a path from that to your goal. You might still be able to move forward, but it will be like groping around in the dark.
Provided that you have measured your best performance for a certain skill, there are two possible outcomes:
- Your best performance is good enough (defined by your goals for learning Chinese): Congratulations! You’ve come far, but you might not be there yet. You need to be able to do this on a regular basis without too much practice. In other words, if you take your average performance and raise it to the level of your best performance, you will have accomplished your goal. To do this, you need quantitative practice, because you already know what you need to know. More of the same will solve your problem.
- Your best performance isn’t good enough: This means that you have a qualitative problem, so more of the same won’t necessarily work, regardless how much you practice. For instance, if you pronounce the first tone in a two-syllable word like Měiguó with a rising tone, you will get it wrong no matter how much energy you spend. There is a fundamental error in the way you pronounce the third tone (it should be a low tone here) and you need qualitative training.
Best performance in different areas
Best performance can be broken down into as many parts as you feel necessary. Here are a few layers with ever increasing detail:
- Your overall Chinese ability
- Your speaking ability
- Your pronunciation
- Your tones
- Your third tones
- Your low third tones
I would say that the first two levels are too general to be practically useful. How do you test your overall ability? I think this is impossible to do properly. The second level is doable, but still hard, we need to get more specific than that. For the third level onward, we can actually do something useful. How specific depends on where you’re having problems. If your tones are fine, you obviously don’t need to check how your low third tones are.
Again, if your best performance in any area is good enough, you just need more practice to make sure that your average performance comes ever closer to your best performance. You might need people to remind you of your mistakes, but in essence, you already know what you need to know. If your best performance isn’t good enough, you need qualitative training, preferably with a teacher.
How to find your best performance
Looking at the above list of layers, it should be obvious that you can cut and slice your Chinese ability in any number of ways. Therefore, it’s hard to be too specific here, so I’m simply going to give some general guidelines for how to define your current best performance in a few common areas.
Best performance for pronunciation
Assuming you’re going to read a short text, you need to:
- Be completely familiar with the topic
- Understand all words, all structures and all meanings
- Know the text by heart
- Record yourself and try to spot mistakes
- Record again, correct the mistakes
- Take a break
- Repeat until you think you really can’t do any better
- This is your best performance
Best performance for composition
Assuming you’re writing a short text, you need to:
- Plan and structure your article before starting
- Research thoroughly, know your topic
- Write a draft and read it to spot mistakes
- Rewrite any problematic sentences
- Read again, correct mistakes
- Take a break
- Repeat until you think you really can’t do any better
- This is your best performance
What to do when you have your best performance
The next step is to answer the question above: is your best performance good enough? The best way of doing that is to ask someone who is trained to assess language ability. Beginner and intermediate learners can probably get away with asking any native speaker, but in that case you will probably only learn what you’re doing wrong, not how to fix it, but this is still helpful.
Best performance for listening and reading
You can do something similar for listening and reading. The principle is very simple: Repeat until you think that you have understood as much as you’re likely to understand at your current level. If you listen to a short text twenty times and still can’t understand one of the sentences, the likelihood is that your best performance isn’t good enough for the audio you have selected. If you re-read a passage several times without getting it, you’re reading skill isn’t up to par. This should be fairly obvious, but has some very useful applications.
For instance, if you understand 60% of an audio episode the first time you listen and 95% after listening twenty times, you can be relatively sure that your problem isn’t that you are unable to understand the audio, it’s just that it’s too fast, your word recall takes too long or there might be layers of accent and/or dialect confusing you. With such a result, more practice is what you need. If you after twenty times still only understand 75%, you’re out of your league and should focus on easier material.
3 comments
Very valuable advice, Olle, as always. Thank you.
Very useful advice that can be applied to many areas, not only Chinese pronunciation. You explained that very well! 谢谢你！
Glad you found it helpful! Like you say, general principles like these can often be applied in wider contexts too, including beyond languages. I sometimes feel like I should write with a bigger target audience, but then again, it’s also good to have a clear focus and application in mind!