Getting the gist from the start

After my Chinese lesson this morning, my teacher and I exchanged a couple of emails. I told her that I thought I had improved—thanks to her—and I was enjoying my lessons. She agreed that I had improved, which was pleasing, and wanted to know if she was speaking too fast for me, and whether I wanted her to slow down a bit from time to time. I've been thinking over my reply this afternoon.

There are times when I'm listening to my teacher speak that it feels like I'm just being bombarded with a succesion of strange sounding Chinese noises which seem completely devoid of meaning. This can certainly feel a little daunting, and even depressing—'how the hell I'm I ever going to get a grasp of this language', kind of feeling. But other times I find myself being able to understand most of what she is saying, and I'm able to distinguish just the individual words that I don't understand.

The conclusion I've come to is is that it is very important to be 100% tuned in as soon as she starts speaking and make sure that I'm listening carefully to the first few words of what is said. I find that if I don't do this, the sentence just becomes a blur, because I find myself fishing in the dark for meaning later on in the sentence.

Chinese has a lot of similar sounding characters—often only distinguishable by the different tones being used—for example: 急 jí second tone，既 jì fourth tone, and 几 jǐ third tone. When these sounds are part of a longer, familiar set of words (or phrase) distinguishing which one is which is is not much of a problem. If you remove the context of the sentence however, and start trying to distinguish between these sounds on their own, at least at the beginner level, it becomes a monumental task, and a few words that you already know can sound incomprehensible.

An example sentence might be:

钱都花了，要去银行
qiándōuhuāle, yàoqùyínháng
All the money's gone, I have to go to the bank.

This is a fairly simple  sentence, and shouldn't pose any problems, but I find that if I miss the first couple of words, I get lost and I'm grasping at the later sounds to try and work out what is going on.

My train of thought might go something like this:

Ooo, Chinese, wait... hualeyaoqu... hm, leyaoquyin...not... Oh.... she's finished. What was that? Crap, now she's waiting for a response. err.... 请你再说一遍。(Please say it again.)

On the other hand, if I'm prepped, ready and waiting, it might go something like this:

qiandou... ah.. all the money... huale, has been spent... oh... missed a bit... yinhang, ah, bank. OK, so, she's spent all her money and needs to go to the bank. Hmm, 哪儿是一家银行。(There's a bank.)

Of course, given time, once you become more advanced, I'm sure this becomes less of a problem, and it becomes easier and easier to pick up the gist halfway through a sentence—like you do in your fist language, I guess. But for now it means that I have to be on my best listening behaviour all the time, to make sure I'm not just sat there listening to a barrage of Chinese noises.