I have been doing daily one by one classes for a long time now and I feel my teacher and I have gotten into a bit of a rut.
My Chinese is fairly decent, and I think this may be the problem as I know enough to get by and spend the majority of my class just bullshitting in Chinese with my teacher.
Can anyone offer up any suggestions to go from that ‘intermediate, I can communicate and read well enough to get by’ level to a more advanced level?
Can anyone also offer up suggestions for things to do in class that travel outside of Shida book 3 and Far Eastern book 2B (my level)?
I used to like to include articles and books on things I liked: sailing, military history, economics. …etc…It gave me vocabulary in topics I liked to talk about.
I also read comic books and read subtitles for low difficulty movies like Plan A
I’ve never had a one-on-one teacher, but in the LE’s I’ve had I always do the same thing - read material on my own (anything works) and use the face time with a native speaker to ask questions about what I didn’t understand, and discuss from there. Extremely efficient and I never ran out of anything to talk about.
teachers aren’t really nescesary especially at your level. Getting better is all about input anyway not talking, so just look for things you are interested in and build your vocabulary. Vocab is the only way to really measure your level anyway.
Absolutely. My sister-in-law claims to know 50 trillion English words and it is true. However, she still can’t put a simple sentence together correctly…
Absolutely. My sister-in-law claims to know 50 trillion English words and it is true. However, she still can’t put a simple sentence together correctly…[/quote]
Sounds like many of my adult students. It’s the teaching method that gets ingrained in them during junior and senior high…
As for the Chinese, I’ve recently realised I have the same problem with my one on one classes. I’m thinking about going back to small group classes at NCKU in June, because I liked the natural banter we used to have with the teacher and other students who couldn’t speak English. I feel I improved more there than my one-on-one lessons, which is surprising because I’ve never been one for classes.
It’s also great speaking with my MIL and BIL because neither of them speak any English, but when new words come up I have problems remembering them later because I learn through sight (reading and writing), so it’s more practice of what I know than actually developing me further.
My ideal would be to find a job where I can actually use the Chinese I know and improve upon it and use it daily. But where can you find a job like that?
A lot of people seemed turned off from the practical audio-visual vol. 3. It has a lot of vocabulary that just isn’t interesting to a lot of students and for many doesn’t seem to be practical. I think I probably liked it more than my classmates, but the fourth volume generally has more useful vocabulary for.
What to use really depends on the way you learn, what you want to improve (more conversation? do you want to learn about how to write a good article?) and what your interests are. As someone suggested already finding easy books on topics that interest you or comics are good, but I find that sort of thing better for additional study, rather than for classes.
If you are interested in different text books there are some from Cheng and Tsui that are supposed to be for supplementary reading. Despite claiming to be high-intermediate/low advanced, they are not very difficult, so maybe if you are at a higher level these are not for you. They just give a short essay, vocabulary, and a few questions. It does not go over sentence patterns or that sort of thing. They use both simplified and traditional characters, so I used it to begin learning simplified in a way that did not require me to tediously look up characters to see the traditional form.
Tales and Traditions vol. 3: Readings in Chinese Literature Series cheng-tsui.com/store/product … s_volume_3
The Moon Is Always Beautiful and Other Essays: Readings in Chinese Culture Series, vol. 3 cheng-tsui.com/store/product … her_essays
There are also some done by Crane Publishing that are more like supplementary readers. The one I had was called “Biography of China’s Master of Water-ink Painting: Qi Baishi,” but it certainly isn’t for everyone.
You could always try discussing dialogues from websites like Chinesepod, that way you could select topics with vocabulary that interests you.
[quote=“danplusdan”]A lot of people seemed turned off from the practical audio-visual vol. 3. It has a lot of vocabulary that just isn’t interesting to a lot of students and for many doesn’t seem to be practical. I think I probably liked it more than my classmates, but the fourth volume generally has more useful vocabulary for.
What to use really depends on the way you learn, what you want to improve (more conversation? do you want to learn about how to write a good article?) and what your interests are. As someone suggested already finding easy books on topics that interest you or comics are good, but I find that sort of thing better for additional study, rather than for classes.
If you are interested in different text books there are some from Cheng and Tsui that are supposed to be for supplementary reading. Despite claiming to be high-intermediate/low advanced, they are not very difficult, so maybe if you are at a higher level these are not for you. They just give a short essay, vocabulary, and a few questions. It does not go over sentence patterns or that sort of thing. They use both simplified and traditional characters, so I used it to begin learning simplified in a way that did not require me to tediously look up characters to see the traditional form.
Tales and Traditions vol. 3: Readings in Chinese Literature Series cheng-tsui.com/store/product … s_volume_3
The Moon Is Always Beautiful and Other Essays: Readings in Chinese Culture Series, vol. 3 cheng-tsui.com/store/product … her_essays
There are also some done by Crane Publishing that are more like supplementary readers. The one I had was called “Biography of China’s Master of Water-ink Painting: Qi Baishi,” but it certainly isn’t for everyone.
You could always try discussing dialogues from websites like Chinesepod, that way you could select topics with vocabulary that interests you.[/quote]
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but why do you (and most of the local friends I have) call that scenario “one by one”? Doesn’t “one by one” mean one after another, sequentially?
Yeah, it should be one on one for solo classes. Fixed.[/quote]
Should be one to one, not one on one. We’re not talking about shagging here. Don’t know how the wrong-siders call it, but of course it doesn’t really matter – we all know they’re wrong, soon as they open their gobs.
