Tolerating Ambiguity: How to Cope With Not Understanding When Learning Chinese

I'm Learning Mandarin

My eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook

Links:

Blog discussing the study Karl mentions demonstrating tolerance of ambiguity plays a decisive role in language learning success: https://sla-materials.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-tolerance-of-ambiguity.html

My podcast discussing the Input Hypothesis and Comprehensible Input with linguist Professor Karen Chung and founder of Hack Chinese Daniel Nalesnik: http://imlearningmandarin.com/2022/08/22/does-stephen-krashens-input-hypothesis-comphrensible-input-work-for-learning-mandarin-chinese/

My blog on how graded readers helped me learn Chinese: http://imlearningmandarin.com/2021/03/17/why-im-a-fan-of-chinese-graded-readers/

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New language learners often find it difficult to cope with the experience of not understanding. We’re used to being in situations in our native language where we can understand almost everything perfectly.

To go from that to suddenly being bombarded with words, phrases and grammatical contractions that are totally alien and incomprehensible to us can be quite jarring.

Yet studies have shown that having higher tolerance thresholds for ambiguity can be a decisive factor in language learning success.

So on today’s podcast, I invited two friends, Karl and Jorge, to discuss how they’ve learned to cope with not understanding and how we can all Chinese learners can develop our tolerance of ambiguity to make our the process of acquiring Chinese smoother and quicker.