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Improve your Listening Skills: Step 2 – Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategies

Listening is a skill in itself—one that second-language research shows is understudied and under-supported in most classes. The best listeners adopt specific strategies—cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective. If you’re struggling with listening comprehension, the smartest thing you can do is to learn these strategies, build techniques around your individual needs, and implement them.

So. You’ve scoured the menu at your local Chinese restaurant and found something you can read. Fingers crossed, it’s something you’d actually like to eat, too. You place the order. Your Mandarin’s perfect—you’ve hit every tone and syllable like a championship boxer. And then . . . then the waiter replies. Years of study evaporate from your brain in a moment. You cannot, for the life of you, understand a word.

If you’ve been there, you’re not alone. But you’re not without hope either.

Listening is a skill in itself—one that second-language research shows is understudied and under-supported in most classes. Not every teacher recognizes this, monopolizing instructional time with yet more reading, vocabulary, and grammar. Likewise, too few students know how to help themselves.

So, what can you do to improve your listening skills?

The best listeners adopt specific strategies—cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective.  If you’re struggling with listening comprehension, the smartest thing you can do is to learn these strategies, build techniques around your individual needs, and implement them.

Cognitive Strategies

Cognitive listening strategies involve manipulating language to make it easier to understand. In other words, it’s about simplification. Any method that requires using your mind consciously and actively to solve a listening challenge qualifies, but—and this is a big one—you really have to do it consciously and actively. 

I know, I know. Listening seems like the single most passive task imaginable. But you need to change listening from something that happens to something you do. You see, you’re already using cognitive strategies, specifically bottom-up cognitive strategies. These involve using your senses to take in the smallest blocks of language and build them up towards meaning. This is incredibly useful, even necessary. The problem is one of overreliance.

Advanced learners use top-down­ cognitive strategies to understand spoken Chinese better than their peers. Rather than stubbornly clinging to every single sound, they use outside information to establish and modify theories. In other words, their listening starts in the brain and flows down toward the senses.

Putting your brain ahead of your ears might sound crazy, but it will help you overcome common listening challenges, like the speed of native speech. Your first step, then, should be identifying which strategies work. Here are the five I’ve found most helpful in improving my own Mandarin listening skills.

 Cognitive Strategy #1: Listening for Gist and Detail

The beginner’s most common mistake is a toxic love affair with word-for-word translation. That is, translating. every. single. word. into English and then cobbling them back together into a meaningful sentence. Trying to understand everything is a guarantee for mental overload.

Instead, you should focus on what’s useful. This is what listening for gist, the broader meaning, and listening for detail, such as key words, is all about. These strategies allow you to manipulate complicated language into something simpler. All they require is changing your focus based on what really matters in a conversation.

Take listening for detail. When you need specific information, that’s where your focus should be. If you need to hear a number, listen only for numbers. Paying a cashier is an obvious time when putting this to practice will help. Even if you hyperfocus on numbers to the exclusion of everything else, you can still pay what you owe.

On the other hand, if someone approaches you out of the blue, you don’t know what you’re listening for. That can be a sign you need to cognitively back up and listen for gist. Don’t get bogged down in every word. Don’t even worry too much about what they’re saying. Instead, focus on what they’re trying to communicate. 

The difference is subtle, but it’s more about understanding the message than the vocab and grammar. Figuring out this person is lost is far more important than the specific phrasing they used. Because now, you can focus on the productive part of the conversation, where they need to go. Think about it this way. You’re trying to read the plot summary instead of all the dialogue in a script.

Cognitive Strategy #2: Context

Another cognitive tool advanced listeners use is context. This requires you to consider what’s happening, who’s talking, and where the conversation’s taking place. Once again, it’s less thinking on the language itself. This time, however, it’s more thinking on everything around it.

To use this strategy, take a moment to consider your current circumstances. What are people holding or gesturing at? What do they likely want from you at that moment? When you stiff your waiter on the tip and they’re angrily waving the check in your face, even the words you don’t know start making sense. Sometimes the meaning just falls into place.

But when a stranger’s talking a mile a minute, differentiating specific words and structures can be hard. Maybe you misheard a tone. Or maybe that next syllable wasn’t a separate word, but part of the first. In situations like this, even basic words can grow more heads than a hydra and threaten to devour you. 

Well, fear not, Hercules. Context can still save the day. One of its main benefits is cutting down the number of possibilities. Restaurant vocabulary, for example, is tens of thousands of words less than the entire language. It’s the same with doctor’s visits and shopping trips. Think about context, and you’ll better know where to focus.

Cognitive Strategy #3: Co-text

Thinking about co-text—the conversation so far—is also a huge help. Longer chats and truly conversational uses of the language move away from immediate demands and surroundings. When that happens, you can fill in the blanks by referring to what’s already been said.

Like other cognitive strategies, co-text relies on critical reasoning. However, you’re not drawing on completely prior knowledge. Nor are you looking at your surroundings to make sense of things. Instead, you need to consider the natural flow of a conversation. Based on what you heard previously, what’s likely being said now?

Suppose you made a cute new friend at the bar, and you got things started showing off your Chinese skills. You’ve held your own in a full-blown Mandarin conversation for quite a while, but now you have a problem. The only words you’ve understood in two minutes were “dǎ zhēn,” meaning to give a shot.

That’s not a lot to go on. So, what do you do? Rather than simply trying to listen harder, you think back. Just a little while ago, you were talking about this person’s dog. A theory starts to form. One more word and it clicks. Your new friend is taking their dog to the vet on Friday—so, no, they can’t take you up on that date.

Cognitive Strategy #4: Forecasting

Forecasting is knowing what someone’s going to say before they say it. Even a presidential address can be a cakewalk when you’ve divined every word of Mandarin ahead of time. Sounds handy, right? But how do you do it?

You make pre-emptive use of other strategies. It’s doing your homework the night before instead of the morning of. Before you go somewhere to practice Chinese, think out the context and the co-text, details and gist. And yes, do it ahead of time. With critical thinking and a little effort, you can anticipate much of a conversation before it happens.  

Returning to the restaurant, there’s a pretty set course of events, isn’t there? The waiter asks if you’re ready to order. You are, so you tell them. Then they ask how you’d like your meal prepared or what kind of rice. Somewhere in there, they’ll ask what you want to drink. Keep going and you can think through every major conversation beat from entering the door to walking out of it.

You can go one step further, and in my experience, you probably should. Don’t stop at the English— “Are you ready to order?” Think out the Chinese: “Nǐ zhǔnbèi hǎo diǎn cài le ma?” If you don’t know it, look it up beforehand. Then, when your waiter asks, your brain is already primed to recognize it.

Cognitive Strategy #5: Guesswork

Sometimes, every other technique fails. When this happens, just guess. Yup. I’m completely serious. Just take a guess. While it may not seem like it, this is a legitimate cognitive strategy. In fact, you may have noticed the prior cognitive strategies all rely on some degree of guesswork.

The key is phrasing guesses in a way that will keep the conversation going and elicit something you can understand. Try gauging reactions to see if your guess was accurate or if you’ve led the conversation astray. Ask clarifying questions. But ask pointed ones. Don’t just default to “what did you say” and “can you repeat that?”

Recently, I was approached in a local dim sum joint. I knew it was food related and nothing else. So, I guessed. I gestured to my empty plate and declared “tèbié hàochī!” The food was “especially good,” but the manager talking to me looked confused and disappointed.

Words she’d said, but I hadn’t made sense of yet, ran through my head—next, chicken, pot. It clicked. She was suggesting I order the chicken hot pot next time. In Chinese, I asked if that was the case. The manager’s face lit up. She continued enthusiastically, clarifying that I should try the chicken dry pot. Guesswork works, if in sometimes unexpected ways.

Metacognitive Strategies

Meta-cognitive strategies are how you bring it all together. These entail thinking about how you learn and planning around that. To a large degree, it’s also recognizing the specific challenges of different scenarios, as well as thinking on the cognitive strategies that will best help you in those moments. But perhaps most of all, it’s about reflecting on yourself.

Consider your Mandarin listening experiences thus far. Have you ever noticed anything specific you struggled with? Perhaps you’ve used Duolingo or a similar app, and you breezed through the early content. But somewhere along the line, you stopped understanding even a single word. Ask yourself what happened. Look for the specific change.

This happened to me, and asking those questions helped me realize that I could easily understand six or seven syllables at a time. But stick in one more, and my brain just couldn’t move fast enough. I was relying way too much on word-for-word translation. You might have noticed something like this in your own studies.  

Before I tell how I addressed my problem, here’s an exercise to get you started on metacognitive thinking. What would you recommend? What would you do in my shoes? Developing metacognitive strategies requires questioning yourself and the scenarios you encounter. It asks you to examine different cognitive strategies and pick the one that’s going to be most effective.

Ultimately, I settled on forecasting. After all, apps like Duolingo categorize language into blocks. They repeat related vocabulary and phrases over and over again. Instead of trying to pick apart these sentences with my ears in real time, I took the text and wrote it down. I practiced saying them myself, repeating them in my head. When I came back to listen some time later, the number of syllables didn’t matter.

Whenever you go out to practice, take some time afterwards to reflect. Consider what went well and what didn’t. Determine what was due to vocabulary shortages, what was due to an overreliance on the wrong strategy, or what was due to nervousness. Which brings us to . . .

Socio-affective Strategies

Your state of mind is the final piece of the puzzle. Not everything is logic and cleverness. There’s a critically important emotional component—anxiety. Anxiety shuts the mind down. It’s why even basic exchanges can leave you grasping for the simplest of words. Everyone gets nervous when practicing a new language. The best listeners respond with socio-affective strategies.

Simply put, these encompass stress reduction and confidence building. Everyone makes mistakes when learning a second language. You will too, and that’s okay. The important thing is finding a way to move past the anxiety. You might not have time for a meditation session in the middle of a conversation, but you can take a slow breath to regain control. Self-affirmation, recalling accomplishments, and thinking positively about outcomes all build confidence.

Personally, the thing I’ve found most helpful is reframing your mistakes. Every single one is a learning freebie. After all, nothing is quite so easy to remember as embarrassment. Accidentally proposition someone while trying to ask for office supplies, and I guarantee you’ll remember every word of both sentences for the rest of your life. Mistakes can motivate you to do research afterward, and as previously mentioned, recognizing them mid-conversation can narrow down correct interpretations.

Eventually, though, even the best mistakes can wear on you.  Pay attention to your emotional state when you’re struggling and note when your confidence starts to flag. You might have gone out too far and found yourself in learning content that’s simply too difficult . It’s okay to swim back to shallower waters and rebuild your confidence before setting out a little further once more.

Final Thoughts

In the end, there’s no one strategy to improve Chinese listening skills. There are many. Getting better relies on using the ones that work best for your individual struggles and skills. But there is a clear path of progression. Start by learning as many cognitive strategies as you can, like the five listed here. Focus on the so-called top-down learning strategies.

Simply by knowing what these strategies are and how they work, you’ll have begun the process of meta-cognitive thinking. Afterward, make a habit to examine yourself and examine these strategies. Implement the ones that work and discard the ones that don’t. As Bruce Lee said, “It is not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away the unessential.”

And if there’s one thing I’d like to stress above all else, don’t give up. It’s too easy to postpone your studies, to stop practicing with strangers after a failed attempt, even to tune out mid-conversation when you can’t follow. Be aware of when that happens, and go back in with twice the passion. 


If you’re looking for help with that, check in with John and Jared at the You Can Learn Chinese podcast. In Improving your listening skills (Part 2 of 2), they break down these critical skills with a thoroughness that could give a Socratic dialogue a run for its money.

About

Anthony Infantino

A one-time Changzhou resident and long-time Mandarin student, Anthony is usually found over a steaming basket of xiǎolóngbāo or traveling the sun-beat streets of a distant city. He’s worked alongside internationals of all ages as a writer, editor, and ESL teacher.

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