Dr. Abner Zhang and I met at the CLTA annual meeting early this year and discussed his research on second-language phonetics and fluency during my visit to Middlebury College last month.

There is way too much conflicting information and advice, so we talk about intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness, three key words and topics that have everything to do with Mandarin speaking and listening, along with a bunch of Second Language Learning research and real-life examples.

0:00 What intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness mean to language learners

10:01 What language learners need to do based on two learning models

16:21 Can "context" fix everything?

18:25 Other factors impacting communication

23:09 Why you don't understand Chinese natives' Mandarin

🎥 Vid ...