Pearl Alexander teaches English in Japan. She blogged:
The typically unintelligible and extra-syllable-laden speaking tests delivered to me by the students had a lone girl who stood out with nearly perfect pronunciation, however quite imperfect grammar.
I was completely astonished. Was she taking extra classes outside of school? If so, why wasn’t she delivering the typically rhetorical machine-gun speech like most of the juku students?
We got to the last question on her test: “What do you like to do in your free time?” She answered: “I often listen to music. I like Avril.”
At Tsinghua University, I had a similar experience. One of a dozen art students giving presentations had much better English than the rest. Did you live in America? I asked him. No, he just watched a lot of English TV and movies. Tsinghua students watch a lot of Friends, not to mention Prison Break and Heroes.
I found a Chinese movie to watch (Together With You) but in one player there is no sound and in another the English subtitles don’t appear! I listen to a lot of Chinese on my mp3 player but it is pretty boring. I should try to find some Chinese songs I like and get translations.
In a similar but not identical vein, I would suggest going a step beyond passive listening, and I would suggest forcing yourself to speak Chinese at native speed.
When I was in Korea learning Korean, my reading and writing skills quickly outpaced my ability to speak and understand spoken Korean. Then I came across a linguistic conjecture that that the same “systems” that allow one to understand spoken language are involved in producing it and vice versa.
So I took the audiotapes that accompanied my language textbooks, and repeated the dialogue at the same speed it was spoken. If I stumbled over my words or paused, I repeated the task. I also used the written text to double check whether I was hearing something correctly. I think the most interesting part of this is I really put very little emphasis on whether I understood what I was saying.
I imagine you could do essentially the same thing with music, TV and movies.
I’m not sure if the linguistic conjecture is necessarily true, and yeah it was pretty boring, but my spoken language production and comprehension improved dramatically.
this american girl who speaks fluent japanese says just about the same thing–she learned through music, basically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLZbocCEUBo&feature=channel_page
In Copenhagen and Stockholm I noticed that older people (over 50) spke English with a distinctly Swedish accent, but many younger people spoke English with a perfect American accent. Apparently they get American TV and movies without subtitles. Stranger, older Swedes have a distinctly Swedish gait, but younger people walk like Americans. This was not true in, e.g. France and Italy; French people, young and old, walk in French, Italians walk in Italian. I cannot account for the difference.
try KMplayer, it’s really good for everything basically, haven’t had 1 file it couldnt’ handle