Hello TL! None of you have probably heard of me, due to me being a fairly new member... But I gotta say, TL is awesome! Out of all the forums I've been browsing and active on, the TL community has been soooo great. You guys are really nice and supportive of everyone and I dunno what else to say but you're AWESOME!
I guess you're wondering why I wrote this blog... I have this girl staying at my house (1st year university) and shes from China. Her dad (my dad's friend) sent her here to learn English. My Chinese isn't that good due to living in Canada for most of my life, and my dad expects me to teach her English... needless to say, I haven't really be able to. So when my dad came up to me and said "You need to make a lesson plan and teach her English before she leaves (aug18)". My first thought: TeamLiquid! So now I come to plead, please help me! If you guys have any ideas of what I can teach her, or how I can teach her, it would help greatly. She really isn't that good at English, and has a very very basic understanding of the language. Oh, one thing that would help EXTREMELY MUCH is to find a Chinese (Mandarin) site that helps teach English. I haven't been able to find one myself, but I think it would help her a lot.
Ikr? She came about a week ago and we have been trying to immerse her in the language, but she only replies to our questions with one word answers (usually Yes, or no) and I have NO IDEA how to approach her. Its very awkward when we have conversations, because we are basically speaking languages that the other person doesn't understand... (if that makes sense). Help please!
find something that interests both of you, talk to eachother about that. Having an English/Chinese dictionary (or google translate) handy helps a lot. Stay patient. Figure out things she wants to learn and try to incorporate them. Go places and do things (then you have more stuff to talk about).
If she's pretty...this is a pretty good excuse to spend a lot of time with her. Just go out and have fun while speaking English. Friend of mine taught this girl Mandarin for a quarter...he ended up banging her at the end. He was a pretty big nerd too; carried one of those small bags that you snap around your waist. Needless to say I was surprised...but I digress.
Immersion is the best way to learn a language, always talk to her in English, have her talk to you in English. Show her English culture (IE facebook). Just refuse to listen or talk in Chinese.
And as a bonus you don't have to do anything! Okay, it's harder than it sounds, and figure out a way so she doesn't get annoyed and stop talking to you anymore
On July 21 2010 07:19 GenesisX wrote: Ikr? She came about a week ago and we have been trying to immerse her in the language, but she only replies to our questions with one word answers (usually Yes, or no) and I have NO IDEA how to approach her. Its very awkward when we have conversations, because we are basically speaking languages that the other person doesn't understand... (if that makes sense). Help please!
Ask her to say more and explain? idk. Maybe deliberately asking questions that can't be answered with y/n.
On July 21 2010 07:39 LSB wrote: Ask her to say more and explain? idk. Maybe deliberately asking questions that can't be answered with y/n.
This shouldn't work, in general Chinese people are very reticent if they don't speak English. Chances are, if you ask her something she can't just say yes or no to, she'll just look at you blankly as you try to awkwardly make your way out of the situation.
She's not going to improve until she gets comfortable expressing herself in English. There's basically three ways you can approach this (probably only pick one since you only have a month). Whenever I get a new Chinese student (I tutor English), I have to do a preposition assessment (see if the student can use the right preposition in sentences) and a pronunciation assessment. The third way is just sheer vocab. Try to get 5 new words, and have her write a short paragraph that uses all five words.
You can pick a grammar book or a pronunciation book at pretty much any major bookstore, and vocab books aren't hard to find. Try approaching her, asking her if she's really interested in learning English, and going through this with her.
This all, however, hinges on the fact that she's genuinely interested in learning English and willing to put some effort into doing so (trying to get her to write something when she doesn't want to is totally a recipe for success). If she's not, she's really not going to learn anything, especially in a presumably Chinese household where immersion is not really 100% possible.Even if you find her a mandarin website, and she doesn't really want to do this, just her dad is forcing her do it, she's not going to improve and you'll just waste your time.
In this case, I think the best thing to do is just go out with her a lot, and be a tourist. Explain things (but don't be condescending, speak retardedly slowly or anything like that. Be understandable when you talk, but don't treat her like an idiot just because she can't speak English), about sights, where are the good places to go in town, and so on. If you do this often enough, you'll 1) make her more comfortable around you and talking in English in general, and 2) hopefully provide some incentive to learn English, so she can communicate with you.
In the scenario where she is willing to put some effort in doing so, you can do the tourist thing too, but you can grab the textbook (whichever approach you pick), go up to her and say "Hey, my dad says I got to teach you English" and set up a time (per week, hopefully) where you go through some exercises with her. Pronunciation will help most in getting being understood, grammar would most likely make her the most comfortable in forming her own sentences, and vocab (though probably the hardest) will probably help her English level in general improve the largest.
If you choose pronunciation, focus on the vowel sounds, especially the long vowels (as in "gate" vs. "cat", "dote" vs. "dot"). Mostly likely if she learned the English she knows in China, she'll also have some British pronunciation in there too, so try to get that out of her so she can speak Canadian English.
If you choose grammar, sentence structure, subject-verb agreement, and tenses are all very useful. One is always tempted to just go through all the tenses, since English has so many, but this gets confusing very quickly, and the practical usage of "At that time, I would have had been walking the cat for a while" is not very great. Prepositions will probably help the most (be sure to read up on them as well, because even native speakers can get confused sometimes about which preposition is right in which sentences).
Vocab is just memorization. Do the short paragraph exercise as often as you can, and otherwise just try to get through as many words as you can. But don't go to fast that she can't remember it all either. Let her set the pace (but only if she's got the motivation).
Hope this helps.
EDIT: Be sure to pick just one, you're not going to have to time to cover all three.
EPT
