Free Audio Books For Downloading Chinese
Amancio Mccrae
I have learnt English to my current level without ever having lived in an English-speaking country. I attribute this mostly to very large amounts of input, mostly in the form of books. When I was around 20, I figured that I would never be able to read all the books I wanted to read, so I started listening to audiobooks as a complement to reading normally.
This is actually easier than it sounds, since by keeping to the same resource, many factors remain constant (such as speaker and style) or at least similar (e.g. content). Variety is good, but it also requires more effort to cope with. You can read the entire article here.
Another factor is that in English, there are many authors who write in a very simple style. In other words, you can be a world-famous author while still writing in plain English, indeed some authors are famous at least partly because they do this (Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene come to mind).
There are a number of factors you should keep in mind when selecting an audiobook. Since many of these vary a lot, you might need to try several before you choose one to actually stick with. This is essential, do not just choose one randomly and dive in, because it might be many times harder than it needs to be.
Audiobooks are a great way of learning and the best kind of long-form content I know. Have you listened to any books in Chinese? Please post a comment and share your experience. If you liked the book, please give some more information so that other readers can listen to the book too!
I recently discovered Seems like a good place to listen to audiobooks. Most of the ones I had a listen there sounded nice. By the way, I found it while looking through some books at shushengbar.net, they mostly post about web novels translated into English, along with the links to audiobooks and the original text, so might be of use to some.
One thing to consider regarding your other questions is if you really want to focus on translated novel. If you do, you really need to check with a native speaker who you trust to verify that the Chinese is reasonably good. There are many translated novels where the language is very unnatural and sometimes reads like English with Chinese words. This is still useful for some aspects of reading and listening practice, but still worth thinking about.
Listening to audio books in a very good way to improve your listening ability beyond the basics. This article contains advice about how to choose a suitable novel, where to find it and how to listen to it.
Bite-sized learning is great, but it's not enough if you want to build real competence in Chinese listening and reading. To expose yourself to enough text and audio, you need long-form content that you can keep using even when you're energy levels...
The solution of which makes me think, maybe watching some Chinese movies/tv shows might be beneficial because they will be talking colloquial Chinese - although I feel like my vocab being a 7k is a little too little for me to comfortably watch the Chinese. Maybe after 12k words/2,500 to 3,000 charachters so I would be more engaged. None of the plots of any Chinese film thus far has really engaged me and turns out feeling more like a chore. Add that on top of them being very difficult to understand.
Obviously an alternative solution for this is both to specifically practice speaking (maybe space repetition a batch of sentences hitting different grammar points in excel) so you have the grammar drilled into your subconscious AND speaking with a native - something like through iTalki is the way to get around the limitations of written chinese and therefore, audiobooks.
There was a time (when I had studied for a couple of years) when people said that I often used overly formal or written language when speaking Chinese, but that came mostly from my trying to use words I had encountered when reading, without having adequate exposure to them. This problem went away by itself the more I spoke with people, though.
Thank you for your earlier linked articles! I like the way you mentioned to get more exposure to longer form media. I found a good source that is not podcast per say. But you can LISTEN/Relisten for the full amount of time.
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I settled on a routine for leveling up my listening. As you may know, I've been focusing on reading the past 6 months, and now I have that mostly under control, I'm focusing on listening. Similar to reading, I think volume is key.
My plan is to listen to audiobooks of stuff I read last year. My goal is to do it: 1) at full speed, 2) without pausing, 3) without looking at text, and 4) (stretch) while doing other brainless stuff like chores. So far I've tried it for 2 weeks, about 15 hours, and wanted to track / share my progress.
1. Baseline: Last I worked on my listening, I had focused on watching Chinese dramas. I had watched 3 series (about 40-ish episodes each), so had about 100 hrs of focused listening to native content. However, I was listening with subtitles the whole time, plus pausing a lot, and I ended up training my reading as much as my listening.
2. When I started: Because I read all of audiobook content already last year, I had hopes I'd be able to jump right ahead to listening at full speed, without the text. Nope. Got lost again.
So as a compromise, I kept listening at full speed and not pause, but would keep the text open in another window. Every 15 seconds or so, I'd glance at the text just to keep my "context" fresh. Even when I didn't exactly read when I glanced, it helped to keep myself oriented.
For the last couple of days, I finally was able to not open up the text in another window, and still keep track of the content. When I get lost, I can rezone back in after 30 seconds or so, and figure out where I am again. I didn't have to stop or pause.
My comprehension is still not that great. I'd estimate only 60-70% of the words are understood, but it's enough to get the gist of the story. However, even when I don't exactly understand the words, I understand what the purpose of the unknown words were -- meaning they're describing an object, it's an action scene with A doing stuff to B, someone is waxing eloquently about the human spirit etc. That's often enough to maintain the thread.
The best part though is the ability to re-orient myself if I get lost. This doesn't seem to be content specific -- it helps even with new stuff, random audio that I haven't heard before. If I can't figure it out right away, just wait a little bit, and I can slowly re-figure out what's going on.
With that, and the increased stamina, I find listening actually takes less energy than reading. Even though my listening is still way behind my reading, I find I can just keep listening to more and more text. It doesn't feel like it's as much "work" as each time I exceeded my reading limits.
4. Listening v. Reading speed: I've gone through at least one complete book in audio. Comparing the time spent listening to that book vs the number of characters in the book, I find the audio goes at 273 cpm. That's still faster than my leveled-up reading speed, which is humbling.
On the other hand, it suggests that listening might eventually help me read faster, so I'll have to see if that's true. I'm a big believer in you having to train your brain to process the Chinese words at the proper speed, whether it's for reading, listening or talking. So listening is still helping train me to process Chinese words at higher speed than before (and I can even go 125% or 150% speed later on).
From my experience this is true. Especially if you follow the text while you listen. Then, your brain gets to passively "read" while you listen and this will further ingrain the characters in your brain. I guess listening without text and then listening with text would be ideal, but then you would need monster self-discipline not to get bored.
I guess 60-70% is only enough to follow the story, because you have read the text before. Whenever I try to listen to something new and I only understand 70% of the stuff, yes, I can tell it is about (e.g.) the Beijing Olympics and skiing, but not much more.
The thing is audio links decay faster, so 6 months later, both of these may be gone. Some of the original links I found when I was assessing the viability of this plan are gone, but I found replacements.
Yes. That's a big reason I picked audio books. It's part of my training wheels. Also, it's been months up to a year since I read it, so it's not like I remember everything. Parts of it still suprise me -- oh I forgot that bit.
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