Making the most of my time at TLI in a one-on-one class?

I’m restarting one-on-one Chinese classes at TLI (Taichung) after a very long hiatus.

I’m a High-Beginner / Low-Intermediate level student.

My goals are conversational Mandarin first and reading second.

I have lived in Taiwan for a great many years and have not made much progress learning Chinese.

work - kids - travel - slack - poor programs - poor teaching - lack of smarts (mine not theirs)

I’ve got a million excuses.

I’m going to be doing 4 hours a week (2 hour classes) at TLI starting today and I want to make the most out of my time.

Besides TLI - I have all of the necessary supplementary stuff. Loads of dictionaries, PLECO, various grammar books, apps etc…

I intend to supplement my classes and the TLI books with www.chineselearnonline.com as well.

What specific things can I encourage my teacher to do during class to get the maximum benefit out of my in-class-time? What problems have people encountered in the past with one-on-one classes? What ways would be best to ‘hack’ a one-on-one class to maximize the good and filter out the bad?

Here is the same question phrased a different way:

What are the most common mistakes that students of Chinese make that tend to slow their in-class progress? Similarly, what are some common mistakes that teachers of Chinese make that tend to frustrate or slow the progress of their students?

Thanks for any ideas or advice.

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Study every day even it for only 10 minutes. Try to get ahead of the teacher so that you are practicing (moving to long term memory) instead of keeping up. I also make sure I have the vocabulary down. List to the recording of the new words. Stop the recording for each work and write both the character and the pinyin/BPMF. Even if you don’t want to write, it helps you build your usable vocabulary by moving it from short term to long term. It’s probably different for everyone depending how you learn. This is what works for me. Just Sunday, I found out that Interstate 5 is closed on the weekend unless you have 2 people in the car. The officer said for me to take Beiyi road. I had no idea and thought he said 北一, but then I saw the sign that said 北宜…

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Google “TPRS” and “comprehensible input”.
Have your teacher speak Chinese to you (listening is more valuable than you “practicing” speaking) but always in a way you can understand. Encourage him/her to translate if possible to make sure you know exactly what was said, if you are in any doubt at all. I mean at all.

Get your teacher to write summaries of what s/he talked about in class in characters. Encourage him/her not to use any words you do not already know in speech, and emphasize that you want repetition of fewer things, not one or two times hearing a lot of things. That goes for reading as well as listening. Narrow and deep is the way forward.

You have to pour language into your head until the “bucket” fills up, and then the water will slop out – you’ll be able to put good sentences together without effort. Practicing doesn’t do that. Input does that. Input you can actually understand.

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I feel like this is precisely the reason why I have failed to internalize the essential Chinese in the past. Conversations with teachers get flooded with too much vocabulary and I simply don’t have time to learn enough of it to use it / listen to it effectively. My first class was yesterday and I’ve asked my teacher to basically start on page one of book one. We’ll plow through the first book within next four hours or so and into book two and then I’ll figure out where I am. I’m going to try to post a chart in my house with all of the new / unknown / or vocabulary that I’ve missed somewhere along the line and encourage my wife and kids to ask me questions using these words or otherwise encourage me to use these words in a full sentence response. If you have any other specific actions I can take or specific techniques that will help to get me over the low-intermediate ‘hump’ I’d very much appreciate it.

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