thank u @meichenxi for ur absolutely gorgeous amazing in depth shadowing answer when i asked.

u can ignore the rest of this post its just gonna be me ranting ToT.

i tried the most tiny form of shadowing and. i think i should try doing it more ;-;. I tried doing what you said - listening to the stress in the sentence, chunking how i say it back if i can’t say the whole sentence (like saying the last phrase, getting that right, then trying to say the last 2 phrases in the sentence, etc). And I realized how BAD i am at doing that beyond literally 1 word chunks or short 2 word chunks like 你知道. Obviously plenty of phrases which are just 4-6 hanzi, but i would mess up with even just those! I could read it, and I could read a sentence aloud one word at a time. But I could not shadow without a ton of errors when I tried repeating lol. 

I also took your advice (or maybe the konglongmandarin advice? or both?? i can’t remember who said to do this) of trying to shadow without looking at the text. While i looked at it the first time to read over the sentence, when i actually tried to shadow i just focused on what i HEARD and repeating it AS IT SOUNDS (not as the pinyin look, not looking at the words so i know the tone). just literally listening, then only using the audio to practice saying it out loud myself. and that takes WAY MORE ACTIVE LISTENING SKILLS then i apparently have lol! I could only do this again with 1-2 word chunks! Anything longer and my brain would forget what tones it heard, forget some of the words, and my mouth would forget to say ‘xie’ right even though i would have JUST saw the character and just heard it correctly and i CAN pronounce it... but on the spot, with no aid but ‘hear the sound, now replicate it’ i just kept messing it up! Lol!

I am sure trying to shadow more will improve my actual listening ability, because i had to focus so MUCH on listening in order to shadow. I had to focus even more then in a show or listening to an audiobook - because i had to do more than just recognize words, i had to say them myself and attempt to say them correctly. so... i will definitely be working up to bigger phrases and sentences, since literally this is so difficult lol ToT (the suggestion to phrase chunk and try first just one, then build up to a full sentence, if u can’t remember or do the whole thing, is helpful - also i think its what Pimsleur kind of does). 

I was listening so much harder because i was not looking at the text, and since i was focusing so much on replicating HOW it sounded i didn’t have time to think ‘ok what is this word, what is its pinyin, what is its tone, what tone changes do i do if it’s 3 3rd tone hanzi in a row’... whereas when im speaking to someone, or myself, i can think all of that first (tho it slows down my speech). but since shadowing the point is to replicate and learn from imitating correct pronunciations (instead of seeing pronunciations on paper), it required a lot more active listening. and i think its probably very good training for speaking skills, speaking ease, and again active listening. maybe also for ingraining tones in words and phrases... i know the tones with words, but i constantly CONSTANTLY have to think about it when i’m speaking like ‘did i say the right one? did i change it when i was supposed to? if i say this phrase what part do i change?’ and even if i know what i’m talking about and know the words i just slow down a lot. so maybe more shadowing will help make more of this a bit more instinctive?

anyway. super hard lol.

i tried with some sentences in Chinese Spoonfed Audio files i have, just because its simple learner material, and already has a built in pause to repeat. And i still fumbled brutally over my words lol! doing this from a show sounds even horrifically harder! So... catch me trying to do it eventually, sometime much sooner than i feel ready for it! 

I remember i used to do it just months into learning chinese, but it was just for simple stuff since those were easy words to pick up: 该死，你知道吗 没事吧， 你怎么了，你放心，别担心，明白了吗？，好名字，他死了，没问题，我没事，太好了，行了，行不行，是不是，还有，我喜欢你，什么东西，天的，漂亮 etc. After stuff got more complicated i basically stopped trying to repeat after shows, i felt i made so many tone mistakes etc constantly i decided it was too hard and i might be reinforcing bad habits if i don’t look at pinyin with tones marked ToT (when i say ‘do shadowing’ i do not mean recording myself or doing anything nearly as impressive and structured as you described lol ToT i mean literally just repeating the character whenever they said something i could say easily after - and those kinds of phrases above i heard enough to do that and were short enough to).

while i think yeah that stunted my speaking a lot? i also am not sure if the judgement call i made was kind of solid to be fair. i was very confused by tones until about a year in when i had a language exchange partner for a while - i had been pronouncing 3rd tone like the 2nd tone, had been rising my 3rd tone too often, and was told basically GO LOWER - LOWEERRRRRR. Until i finally grasped ‘ok 3rd tone is more like just the LOW’ tone. and if you pronounce it fully like in an elongated wo... wo bu zhidao, then yeah you will hear it dip then go up. And if its before another 3rd tone its a 2nd tone. but if you just hear it, you’re generally hearing ‘low’ without really much rise, and starting lower than the 4th tone drop (so the drop in 3rd tone isn’t as clear). And until someone TOLD ME 3rd tone was so low i just had no idea, i could NOT even hear it right. And that’s why i still have some fears about shadowing... if i do NOT know a language feature? I have a decent chance of literally being UNABLE to hear it. Unable to hear it correctly, unable to notice it. For me i literally could NOT tell how my 3rd tone sounded wrong. I had to be told to notice ‘THIS IS HOW LOW IT GOES’ and ‘GO LOWER’ constantly until i got it. With 1st tone, i kept accidentally doing 2nd tone because i could NOT hear that i was raising my voice at the end. It took someone repeatedly telling me its not so much ‘high’ as it is ‘completely level’. 1st tone u do not raise or lower ur pitch! i did not even hear myself doing it until i got called out and constantly tried to consciously notice if i was keeping it the same exact level or not. 

And now i get the same issues with ‘c’ and ‘sh’ and ‘b’ and ‘q’ noise in chinese... i use the app 普通话学习 to practice pronunciation (it grades you). And no matter what i can RARELY hear how i do ‘c’ and ‘sh’ and ‘b’ wrong. I have listened to examples, i’ve repeated them, i’ve read different books way of describing the sounds. In the app i try to repeat the hanzi that start with those over and over, and whether i get ‘perfect’ or ‘wtf did you say’ is literally luck. i cannot tell at all how i am mistakenly pronouncing them, when i say them wrong. i can’t hear my mistake at all, i can’t hear any difference between my pronunciation and the examples. (Same with ‘eng’ and ‘en’ endings... but i think i might.. maybe hear a difference in my pronunciation to theirs... still though i have no idea). 

So a big reason i didn’t shadow much, ESPECIALLY trying to shadow without pinyin to look at and DOUBLE check i know the correct tone etc, is because i worry i will keep reinforcing bad pronunciation i can’t even HEAR in my own voice. I will go ‘ok yes finally! i imitated the audio right!’ and then not realize i fucked up 4 things i just cannot hear properly. I just cannot tell i’m even doing wrong. I worry about that significantly less now, since i generally always get my tones right if i know them... so i’m guessing i have a solid enough sense of how they’re supposed to ‘correctly’ sound now that if i hear them in audio without text, i will have enough in my brain to instinctively recognize its a part of the sound that exists and replicate it as i’m hearing it. (though i am still constantly afraid i’ll hear a tone wrong, replicate wrong, and not even fucking notice i’m making a mistake). Now most of the fear is just with those couple initials and finals i just... fuck up half the time and CANNOT hear why they’re wrong. i can’t hear the difference at all. but i’ve been consistently messing them up for like 4 months now so... if i haven’t improved them in this long, i might as well still do some practice like with shadowing. i’ve been using that pronunciation app, and even with all of it doing its best to tell me ‘it sounds WRONG’ i can’t tell. so i could call using that app ‘reinforcing bad habits’ at that point just as much as shadowing, maybe. i get the sounds right half the time, wrong all the time, cannot hear the difference. so i don’t think shadowing is gonna hurt me much more than i’m already hurting myself here... since its pretty clear unless i get someone to explain, i’m unable to fix these bits. 

anyway that is the tldr for why i didn’t shadow much at all. and maybe... maybe my tones are decent enough now... i might try a bit more. although when i tried yesterday, i was literally so afraid i fucked up the tones that i went to look up the sentences to double check i hadn’t. and i still could not ‘name’ the tones i was saying as i repeated them in shadowing. i was too busy speaking, i had no idea IF i was doing tones or WHICH ones i was just focusing EVERYTHING on trying to remember the sounds i heard and repeat. not the meaning, not the words specifically, not the tones lol. yes i am a mess lol ToT