This is a very interesting experience, thank you so much for sharing! It ties in the problem of labelling the world with top-down listening, something I haven’t considered in detail before and certainly not written about. Your example is an excellent case study of different aspects of listening comprehension and the challenges on each level. This is so cool, because I just made up such an example for my listening course! Would you mind if I used your example, either there or in an upcoming article? I can keep it anonymous if you want.

Anyway, the interesting thing about labelling (which I wrote about here) is that if you had known what the story was called in Chinese, none of this would have happened, not even the bottom-up 鱼/雨 error, because your top-down listening would have been able to figure that out. Naturally, it’s not realistic to know the names of everything in Chinese, but If ind it interesting that this is a somewhat unique problem to learning a language that deals with transcriptions the way it does. While I’m sure that the proper name Jonah is pronounced somewhat differently in e.g. English, Swedish and French, it still stands out as a proper name, whereas in Chinese, it could equally well be a word you just haven’t studied yet.

Anyway, I don’t think my reply here helps much, but it’s interesting to dissect what’s going wrong when we don’t understand someone, and surprisingly often, it’s not actually on the sound/tone level!

Just yesterday, I was talking with my son’s art teacher. She told me my son had painted a depiction of 约拿和大鱼 – yuēná hé dàyú.

My first problem was actually bottom-up listening as when she said 大鱼 dàyú, I had understood 大雨 dàyǔ. The fact that I hadn’t perceived the difference in tone between ‘heavy rain’ and ‘big fish’ had me barking up the wrong tree right from the start.

But luckily, I knew from looking at the style of the painting, with the bearded man kneeling in prayer, (top-down listening) that my son had painted a biblical scene.

So hearing ‘heavy rain’ I concluded that he had painted Noah and the Ark. I tried to clarify by saying that the story featured a big ship. The teacher nodded that a boat does feature in the story. But I was still not sure as 约拿 didn’t sound a lot like Noah.

I then mentioned all the rain we had been having recently and all the rain in the story. The teacher smiled politely but I could see we were talking at cross purposes again. I suddenly realised that we were not talking about Noah and the Ark.

I was desperately searching through my bible lessons at school trying to work out what my son’s art teacher was talking about.

The teacher concluded that I didn’t know this biblical story and began to tell me about it. Gradually I realised that it was that one where somebody got swallowed by a whale – but what was his name?

Suddenly, my brain was able to pick out my lesson from primary school bible class and I realised she was referring to Jonah and the Whale.

Had my world knowledge been better and had I been more familiar with the biblical story, and had my ear for tones been better, I would have understood Jonah and the Whale much faster.

On the issue of random questions, a stranger walked up to me the other day while I was having my bicycle repaired and asked me “What do you think of the new British prime minister then?” I know the word for ‘prime minister’ in Chinese but it took me a few seconds to remember it and figure out what he was asking me.