他们说太快了

Xiao Yue, last month I got a perfect score on my Chinese listening test. Yesterday at a convenience store, four words destroyed me.

Four words? Which four words are that powerful?

Do you want a bag.

Just those four words?

Just those four words. The cashier said it three times, I didn't catch it once, and in the end she typed it out on the calculator for me.

Haha, so how did you finally figure out she was saying do you want a bag?

I only worked it out on the way home. That's the most embarrassing part.

I think I know exactly how she said it. Fast and soft, with the last word almost silent, right?

Yes! How did you know?

Because she says that line three hundred times a day. Nobody says a three-hundred-times-a-day line one clear word at a time.

But I know all four of those words. Written on paper, I'd get it in one second.

And that's exactly what we're talking about today. It's not that you don't know those words. It's that you've never heard what those words actually sound like.

What they actually sound like... Xiao Yue, tell me honestly, was that perfect score fake?

It wasn't fake. I've just seen so many people ace a listening test and then walk out and not understand a simple do you want this heated up.

So what was the test actually measuring?

How much you can understand under perfect conditions. A broadcaster's voice, standard Mandarin, normal speed, and pauses.

And what was the convenience store measuring?

Real life. A cashier who's been on her feet all day, saying her three-hundredth line of the day, with someone on the phone right next to you.

Put like that, the gap is huge.

Let me give you a way to think about it that'll make you feel better. Your listening isn't bad. You've only ever seen the edited photo, never the actual person.

The edited photo?

Textbook audio is the edited photo, every word lined up perfectly. Real speech is the actual person, hair messy, shirt wrinkled.

But I live in China. Everything I face is the actual person.

So today we're not talking about tests. I'm going to give you five reasons why real spoken Chinese is so hard to understand.

Five? Then I'd better pay attention.

And at the end I'll give you four ways to practice, plus three lifesaver lines you can use the moment you're lost.

Then let's start with the first one.

The first truth, and the most important one. You feel like they talk too fast, right?

Way too fast! It feels like Chinese people talk three times faster than I do.

Let me tell you something you probably won't believe. Chinese people speak Chinese at about the same speed English people speak English.

No way. English never feels fast to me.

That's because when you listen to English, you're not listening word by word.

I'm not?

You're not. With English, a whole sentence goes into your ears and you take it in big chunks. But with Chinese, you're picking it up one character at a time.

Now that you say it... you're right. When I listen to Chinese, my brain is busy identifying characters.

You're counting individual grains of rice. We're handing it to you by the bowl.

By the bowl... no wonder I can't keep up.

Let me give you a clearer comparison. How do you recognize someone's face?

I just... look once and I know who it is.

Do you look at the eyes first, then the nose, then the mouth, assemble it in your head, and finally go, oh, this is Xiao Yue?

Of course not, that'd be way too slow. I see the whole face at once.

Exactly. Chinese people hear Chinese as one whole face. Right now you're assembling facial features.

Seeing the whole face versus assembling features one by one... okay, that comparison got me.

So the problem isn't their mouths. It's that your ears haven't learned to listen in chunks yet.

What counts as a chunk?

Take let me tell you something. Those few words are one single thing in our heads, an opening signal, not four separate words.

Let me tell you something.

There's also you know what, well what do you think, how about this, okay okay, don't even get me started. These are all whole chunks. We don't break them apart when we say them, so don't break them apart when you hear them.

So I should memorize them as chunks and hear them as chunks.

Right. If you learn fifty chunks like that, you'll feel like Chinese people suddenly slowed down.

They didn't slow down. I'm just taking in more per grab.

Exactly right. That's what we call practice makes perfect.

Practice makes perfect?

Once you've done something enough, you naturally find the trick to it. With listening there's no other road. There's only doing it a lot.

Okay, I've got the first truth. What's the second?

The second one might annoy you a bit. When real people talk, they get lazy, and some sounds just fall off.

Fall off? Where do they go?

Gone, not pronounced. Or mumbled, swallowed inside the mouth.

Isn't that just speaking incorrectly?

It's not incorrect, it's saving effort. Everyone wants to save effort when they talk. That's the same all over the world.

Hold on, this is making me think of English. Going to, we say gonna. Want to, we say wanna.

Isn't that the exact same thing? You've never once thought gonna was wrong.

Because I've heard it that way since I was a kid. But learning Chinese, my textbook never taught me any of this.

Textbooks don't, because textbooks have to teach the standard. But standard Mandarin, how many times a day do you actually hear it?

Let me think... on the news, in subway announcements.

Right, and all the rest of the time, it's effort-saving Chinese. Let me give you the most common ones. You'll get it immediately.

Go ahead, let me write these down.

Number one, zhè yàng zi, this way. Said fast in real life, it collapses into two sounds. Young people online just write it as jiàng zǐ.

Jiàng zǐ? The jiàng like in soy sauce?

Yes, that jiàng. Zhè yàng zi, jiàng zǐ. Say it once yourself and you'll hear why.

Zhè yàng zi, jiàng zǐ... they really do sound alike!

Number two, shén me, what. Lots of people just say shá. When you hear a shá on the phone, don't panic. That's shén me.

Nǐ shuō shá is nǐ shuō shén me.

Right. Number three is the most important one, nà ge, that one.

Nà ge? But I know that one, we learned it in lesson one.

Look it up in a dictionary and it gives you one pronunciation. But out of 1.4 billion people, almost nobody says it that way. Everybody says nèi ge.

Nèi ge?

Nèi ge. Go listen on the street. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people say nèi ge. The version your textbook taught you is only used by broadcasters.

So for years, I've been waiting for a sound that's never going to come.

That's a great way to put it. You're waiting for the textbook sound, and in real life it doesn't show up, so of course you don't understand.

Any more? I want all of them.

Yǒu méi yǒu, do you have, young people say yǒu mù yǒu. Duō shao qián, how much, the middle two sounds get so light they nearly vanish. Zhī dào le, got it, the zhī at the front often disappears entirely and you're left with dào le.

Just dào le? Then what I hear is only two sounds.

Right. And another really common one, shì bu shì. That bu in the middle is so light and short that all three sounds come out like one word.

Shì bu shì... I get it now. I've been searching for three clear, separate sounds.

There's one more category you need to watch out for, the northern er sound.

I know the er sound, zhèr, nàr.

Not just those. Yī huìr, yī diǎnr, yǒu shìr, wánr, nǎr. When Beijing people talk, that er is everywhere in the sentence.

What does that sound like to me?

It sounds like the word changed. Take yī diǎnr, a little. If you only ever learned yī diǎn, you'll think he said a brand new word.

That has actually happened to me. Someone told me děng yī huìr, wait a moment, and I kept wondering what huìr meant.

Haha, huìr is just huì. Northerners add an er, southerners don't. It's the same sentence.

Xiao Yue, I've got a big question now.

Go ahead.

If everyone actually talks like this, why do textbooks still teach the version nobody uses?

Because a textbook has to give you a clean version first. If you'd never heard the standard and jumped straight into effort-saving speech, you'd fall apart.

So the textbook is step one, not the whole thing.

Right. The textbook gives you a photo. You have to go recognize the real person yourself.

I always assumed the textbook sound was the real one, and everything in real life was substandard, kind of broken.

It's the other way around. What's in real life is the real thing. The textbook sound was manufactured for teaching.

Flipping that around, I realize I've spent years fighting against real Chinese.

It's not too late to flip it now. On to truth number three. Guess how much of what a real person says carries no information at all.

No information? Isn't all talking about conveying meaning?