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.
Immersion. Take her to a restaurant / shopping mall / etc, have her try to speak for herself, help her along the way, etc. It'll be romantic and she'll learn English :D + Show Spoiler +
I am being serious, you have to force her to learn the language. Make her go somewhere that necessitates her being able to express herself in english
Thanks for the suggestions: I'll definitely try to find some chinese-subbed English tv/movies for here to watch.
On July 21 2010 08:24 Thratur wrote: Teach her Starcraft? Seriously, when I was 7 years old, I learned a lot of English from Starcraft! Or any video game really.
Umm... I think she would rather play random facebook games lol.
EDIT: @Vanka: WHOA!!! Thats is exactly the type of advice that I needed. Thanks!
This might sound a little bit extreme, but it really does help you learn a language:
Make her watch TV 24/7!
Ok, 24/7 is slightly exaggerated, but 12 hours a day will do the trick. Just make sure that all the films she watches are in English... Also sitcoms might be too difficult to understand because of all the idioms. If she doesn't know any English then it would be advisable to grab some English teaching book and just go with her through the basics (first 4-5 chapters) and only after this make her watch TV (you would have to raise her daily pensum to 14 hours to make up for the lost time). After a month she will be talking exactly like the main charcter of her favorite show!
On a more serious note: watching movies/serials/news etc. in a foreign language greatly improves your comprehension skills. Also you pick up a lot of phrases and get a grasp of the general use of many words. However, not everything on TV works well... Talk-shows and reality shows most certainly won't help you learn anything usefull....
Pick every day conversational topics. Ideally, something she has an interest in or is knowledgable about.
Get her to "research" vocab for the topic - you can help her by giving her a list of key words. Like if she is interested in movies, give her a list like "genre, soundtrack, actor, director, theme, plot, narrative arc, setting, hero" etc. She should research the words with a dictionary and get familiar with them.
Then have a conversation about the topic, for a determined period - depends a bit on how confident she is, but say 5 or 10 minutes to start, longer if she can do it. Ask her questions about the topic, starting simple, using as much of the prepped vocab as you can and encouraging her to use that vocab. If you can, encourage her to ask you questions as well. For example, 5 minutes of you asking her about her best and worst movies and why, and then 5 minutes of her asking you the same sorts of questions.
After you have finished, get her to ask questions about English usage, and correct any mistakes you observe (you can take notes while you talk; don't correct every single error, concentrate on repeated or serious ones; don't correct her during the conversation (you want to keep her motivated and focussed on communication, not grammar per se), save it till the end).
Then, get her to write something (short) on the topic, using her vocabulary as much as possible. Correct this composition in detail ie. all errors.
Try and do a different topic each day, if you both have the energy.
Re TV and such like - that can help reinforce language learning, but there has to be some actual real "langauge learning" going on to be reinforced!
I'll start sending her emails with assignments and fixing her mistakes lol. But now I just need one thing: An English TV show with Chinese Subs! I really need help finding one, as I think this would help a lot. Please help me find one!
Just look up an chinese streaming site (I think youku is one?), there's plenty of American tv shows on there with Chinese subs. I remember when I watched House, glee, prison break, etc. there were versions of them on sites like that with chinese subs.
Otherwise Chinese p2p? I guess it would be more difficult for us second gen Chinese who don't read chinese fluently, but there has to be tons of stuff out there.
Hell, if she watches American tv (lots of chinese people do), she'd probably have a decent idea of where to find some.
On July 21 2010 13:14 endy wrote: This is a great site. http://www.nciku.cn/ But I guess the point of sending her to Canada was not to make her learn with a website.
Hah. She spends most of her time on the computer anyways lol. This website is great! I can't read the chinese but I can see the English on it and it seems very educational. I will suggest it to her now.
Also: Thanks for all who posted! These are all great suggestions and I will "put them to good use" ^_^
EPT
