Insights from my recent trip to China: The importance of top-down listening

I just returned from a three-week trip to China after not having set foot in the country since before the pandemic. As usual, being in an immersion environment makes one think about the Chinese language and culture, and what it’s like to approach them as a foreign adult.

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I have been learning Mandarin since 2007 and have reached a fairly advanced level, but I still learnt a lot during my visit. I didn’t learn that many new words or expressions, but I gained several important insights. One of them is about listening comprehension, which is what I will discuss in this article.

Top-down listening is more important than you think

In summary, top-down listening is extremely important. I have talked about this before, but even though I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching listening comprehension, I was still reminded over and over how much top-down listening matters. In essence, when we process spoken language, we do so in two directions:

• Top-down listening: This involves using context, background knowledge, and expectations to interpret what we hear. It allows us to make educated guesses about the meaning of the words and phrases based on the overall situation. This is covered in part three of my series on listening comprehension: Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 3: Using what you already know to aid listening comprehension in Chinese.
• Bottom-up listening: This involves decoding the actual sounds, syllables, words, and sentences we hear. It’s about recognising and understanding the individual components of speech. This is covered in part two of the same series: Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 2: From sound to meaning in Mandarin.

Most people think that bottom-up listening is what it’s all about, and that is partly true when you first start learning the language. You will think about tones all the time and do your utmost to separate all the pesky initials that somehow sound the same to you.

However, this is just a short phase, something you will get over. Top-down listening is what determines how much you understand. Without it, you will understand very little, even if your Chinese level is very advanced. Most of the insights I want to share in this article have in common that you have to have context to be able to apply top-down listening. Without context, Chinese often becomes impossible to understand.

Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 1: A guide to Chinese listening comprehension

Insight #1: Navigating Mandarin accents and unfamiliar speech patterns

One of the most challenging aspects of my trip was understanding different dialects and local speech patterns. Even though I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the capital, I still find thicker Beijing dialect hard to understand, especially when spoken by young people or pensioners. This challenge was further highlighted when leaving the city proper and the accent started shifting.

I spent a week about an hour’s drive west of the city, where people often spoke with accents I wasn’t familiar with. Without a solid foundation in top-down listening, keeping up with these conversations would have been nearly impossible. However, when I was able to rely on context, I could still make sense of what people said. Still, it’s somewhat daunting that even after studying this language for so long, local dialects can cause enough trouble to make communication hard. Remember, this is not a completely different language, we’re still only a few dozen kilometres from the city proper!

The importance of prior knowledge in listening comprehension cannot be overstated. In the article about top-down listening linked above, I described three types of prior knowledge: pragmatic, discursive, and world knowledge, and they all play vital roles in understanding spoken Chinese. Pragmatic knowledge helps in understanding how words are used in real-world contexts, discursive knowledge aids in grasping the structure of conversations, and world knowledge provides context about the world we live in.

When listening to authentic Mandarin, you need all of these, but in this particular case, discursive and world knowledge are probably the most important. If you don’t have a good idea of what to expect in a certain type of conversation, it will be hard to understand. Similarly, if you don’t know much about the specific aspect of the world a speaker is referring to, it will again be hard to understand. When you don’t know about or understand their world, it’s also harder to understand what they’re saying.

Insight #2. Top-down listening is mostly about things beyond language

Interestingly, top-down listening is not solely about language proficiency. In fact, it’s mostly about other things!

Of the three knowledge types mentioned above, only pragmatic knowledge is firmly in the realm of language proficiency. I think most people would agree that it’s important to know that words can have extra layers of meaning and be used in different ways depending on context. Discursive knowledge is also related to language, but it’s not the kind of thing you typically learn from textbooks or in class.

How do people answer the phone? What are you supposed to say when interacting with a delivery service? What’s appropriate to say to a neighbour when you meet them on your evening stroll? When you’ve lived in a language for a long time, you know these things and they inform your parsing of spoken language, making Chinese easier to understand. When you have mostly learnt from textbooks or in a classroom, this knowledge gap can be challenging.

World knowledge is beyond language, however. Knowing about a celebrity, an impactful recent local event or where a certain famous landmark is not regarded as part of your language proficiency, yet it has a big impact on your ability to understand spoken Mandarin.

That one time when my listening comprehension was better than that of native speakers

An interesting example of this was when I found myself in a large hospital with two native speakers, trying to follow directions to another part of the building. Despite being fluent in Mandarin, my companions didn’t actually understand part of the instruction, but I did. This was not because my Chinese was better than theirs, that’s not the case, but it was because I had a better mental model of the building’s layout and could connect what the person giving directions meant.

As mentioned earlier, you have to have context for this to work, which is why authentic listening is so important. In the real world, you often have context (I knew where I was when I received the directions), but when doing listening exercises in your textbook or with your teacher, you usually don’t, or at least the context is less authentic. This means that you don’t practise essential skills you need to master to deal with real-world listening!

Finally, let’s look at an exception to this, a situation when you have no context at all.

Insight #3: The challenge of context-less random comments

One of the most perplexing moments during my trip was when a child asked me a completely unexpected question about igloos in Sweden. Despite knowing all the words and the child speaking clearly, I couldn’t comprehend the question initially. The lack of context made bottom-up processing insufficient, and it took me too long to piece together the meaning. Once I had understood the question, it was a little bit too late to tell him about the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi.

Similarly, I faced another situation where someone asked me a bizarre question about Swedish politics out of the blue. The unexpected nature of the question made it difficult to process, emphasizing how crucial context is for comprehension. When we have contextual clues, our brains can make educated guesses about what we’re hearing, allowing for smoother and faster understanding. When we don’t, understanding becomes elusive.

While I don’t have any experimental evidence to back this up, this seems to happen more in Chinese than in other languages. This is not surprising considering that many things that are encoded on the word level in languages like English or French can only be deduced from context, something I talked about here: Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 6: Why is listening in Chinese so hard?

Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 6: Why is listening in Chinese so hard?

How my insights can help you learn Mandarin

So, why am I sharing all this? Well, mostly because I think it’s interesting, but also because I think it can be helpful for other learners. It takes long experience to understand how important top-down listening is and how context-dependent Chinese can be. As I said, I’ve been learning the language for more than fifteen years and have researched listening comprehension in a second language for hundreds of hours, and I still underestimate the importance of top-down listening.

This means that you are almost certainly doing the same thing. The problem for most people who don’t live in an immersion environment is that listening to podcasts really isn’t enough. Sure, it’s a great start, but it’s not enough. To learn how to navigate real-world conversations, you need real-world practice. If you can’t get it for real by going to China, you might still be able to simulate it by engaging in role-playing activities with a language exchange partner or tutor.

The point is that top-down listening is a skill that you will develop over time. This is something I will return to later, as I’m creating a course dedicated to helping students improve their listening comprehension. For now, I just wanted to share a few observations from my trip and encourage you to focus more on top-down listening!

The Fluent Listener: Navigating Mandarin Like a Fish in Water