Yes, it can be frustrating! I also agree that the problem doesn’t really go away, or at least that it takes a very long time for it to diminish to a manageable level. I have, for example, not spent more than a few months in northern China, so I find local accents quite challenging sometimes. I included a few examples of this, and also some ideas about why this is hard, in an article I wrote after a trip to China last year. Maybe you’ll find it interesting: Insights from my recent trip to China: The importance of top-down listening

Originally, the article was only about that claim. For people who have been learning Chinese for a while, many of the other factors are obvious and, therefore, not very interesting, but that one stands out to me as clearly true when I first heard it in grad school, although hard to prove. My plan is to revisit this topic separately at some point, but whether that’s later this year or 2030 I don’t know. 🙂 Btw, I almost called the article “Why Listening in Chinese So Damn Hard” as a hommage, but decided not to for various reasons.

This is a ludicrously late reply to your insightful comment! I must have missed the comment when you posted it and only saw it now when I’m working on a revised version of this article. Anyway, I think you bring up several important points that I will consider adding to the article itself.

1) Formal Chinese being very dense. I think this is definitely true for Chinese read aloud, more so than for other languages. It’s probably the case that formal language tends to be more concise in general, but the strong. preference for two syllable words and contractions in formal, written Chinese makes this much harder. I don’t think Chinese is more information-dense than other languages in general; all the studies I’ve seen about spoken language tend to say that the information conveyed is about the same, so languages that have more syllables per minute also has less information per syllable. This tallies well with your second point, which I will also add.

2) Short words are harder than long words. I completely agree with your statement that people mistakenly tend to think that the opposite is true. I mean, longer words are harder to say, but certainly not harder to hear. In my native Swedish, we have some rather long words, and it goes without saying that longer words are more different from each other than shorter words. The fact that they are said faster doesn’t make them harder to hear, because they are still more different from each other than comparable words in Chinese. The distance between “university professor” and the acoustically closest alternative in English that doesn’t include either of those words is very far compared to 大学教授 in Chinese.

So, late reply to your comment, but thank you for posting it nonetheless!

I think people often assume that languages with longer words (like Russian or German) are harder to learn, but I think they are actually much easier as it slows down the semantic onslaught when listening, and also gives you more means by which to differentiate words both when hearing them and learning them.

I don’t know about the first bit (i.e. I have no idea), but I’m sceptical about the second part. I think the reason they (mainly referring to speakers of Chinese here) drop endings is because of syllable structure more than anything else. If you come from a language that only allows three consonant sound at the end of syllables and no complicated consonant clusters, it’s going to be hard to pronounce words like “talked” or “practised”. This can be heard sometimes when people insert extra vowels to conform to the syllable structure of their native language. An example would a cluster like “st” in “study”, pronounced as “sətudy” to avoid the cluster. The same thing can be achieved in words like “talked” by simply omitting the ending.

I guess this would be possible to test by checking if they drop “-ed” more often when it’s part of a consonant cluster compared to if it appears directly after a vowel. I have never really studied this topic, though, maybe there already are such studies?

Another factor worth considering is grammar and morphology. Native speakers of Chinese are not used to the whole idea of adding seemingly arbitrary, small sounds to the end of words to make them fit in a sentence. Sure, we have some particles in Chinese too, but I think we can agree that’s not really the same thing.

I noticed that cab problem happening even to a native speaker (she annoyingly said to a didi driver on the phone, that she could not understand his putonghua, and later even complained to me saying people from that province speak very weird Mandarin (she was from Haerbin and the driver was from Xian).

Well, the article you left a comment to answers your question, so I’m not sure what I can add to make it clearer. 🙂