If I ask 10 people this question: Do you think why you don't understand when you are talking to Chinese people?
It's a safe bet that I'll get one answer: It's the vocabulary. I need to learn more vocabulary.
Vocabulary certainly is a barrier, but it is one only for beginners. There are people who have learned Chinese for years, and accumulate vast amount of vocabulary. But when in real life, they still get lost quite quickly.
In fact you face three barriers:
1- vocabulary and sentence patterns
2- talking speed
3- accent
The first one is the easiest one to solve. You can employ many different methods. The end result is to remember certain words and sentence patterns. It's also the reason why learning reading and writing is easier than learning listening and speaking. When in reading and writing, your brain has time to recollect your memory, and if you have done your homework well you will find it easy to learn reading and writing. Although it's the easiest one to accomplish, memorizing large amount of vocab and grammar patterns can still be a daunting task.
The second one is not so easy to tackle. And most of the time, it's speaking speed that hinders your understanding. You have no time to reflect and it's already over. You need to have rigorous training on listening until a foreign sound becomes so familiar and you can call it your second nature. It's not so easy. It requires hours and hours of listening training.
The third one is the most difficult. When you are out of your classroom and your standard tape recording, you face people with different accents. There are so many different accents out there. And those accents can really lost you. The good news is if this is the only reason why you don't understand, you can adapt to it fairly quickly.
In the end, that's just why there's so much fun in learning Chinese!
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