I'm at 50 hours of listening practice.
A few events have happened in the time I logged 20 hours of listening, so I best explain what those are.
1/ I started university again 4 weeks ago. Because I've been busy with other things, I've not had the time and energy to devote to listening practice that I had before.
2/ I've started learning to read Chinese independently. I am focusing on learning the meaning independent of sound, however since most Chinese TV runs Chinese subtitles at the bottom, occasionally a word pops up that I recognize and this helps with learning.
3/ I started taking a Chinese class in university. However this is not a very big impact. The class is an example of what not to do in teaching language. Most of the class is given to explanations of where to put the tongue in the mouth to make a certain sound or repeating a sound as the teacher frantically rushes between 30 students to tell us if we are making the sound correctly. In four weeks I have learned only 20 words and 4 sentences. And in those 4 weeks I estimate that I have heard Chinese spoken in class for approximately 5 minutes.
So, lets have a look at my progress.
Here you can see a cumulative graph of my comprehension, hour by hour. You can see while it was volatile before, my estimates have plateaued out at about 15%. I don't expect these estimates to be extremely accurate until I reach higher percentages, but I will track them over time in any case.
As you can see, my comprehension for news, reportages and documentaries have gone up. This is largely due to the fact that these are what I've been listening to. I haven't been watching many entertainment shows, especially as they contain a lot of singing generally, and they aren't too helpful for my purposes.
The other category that stands out is dramas, which have actually gone down. I think I overestimated my comprehension earlier, and I want to be more conservative with my estimates.
That being said, I definitely have noticed a difference in my listening skills. It doesn't take much concentration at all to hear words clearly any more. And even when I don't know what they mean (which is most of the time), I can generally hear it and recreate it later on. I'm sure my pronunciation isn't perfect, but I feel that I can self correct to a pretty decent level.
I feel that this is an important skill that is mostly taken care of. I had estimated to have a good ear after 100 hours of listening, but it has come earlier than expected. Of course this is only the base and will need refining, but what this means is that I can now put my mental effort into understanding word order and connecting words with context in the storylines.
I will keep up with the listening, albeit it a slower pace. I will report back at 100 hours.
