If this is how people teach here, I can see why the population at large is in a mess about language learning. The one to which I linked below airs at 5:00 or 5:30 AM.
Problems (told in the second-person, because I was mentally yelling these at the screen):
[ol][li]That’s a thick Southern twang for an American TV co-host, isn’t it?[/li]
[li]Hey, did you get that word in the English-Chinese word list lightning round?[/li]
[li]Why in the hell would you pick Taiwanese people to do the English dialogue? Could you only hire one foreigner for the program?[/li]
[li]That’s some damned awkward phrasing you’ve conjured up there! You could actually make it better if you didn’t try to cram every term and phrase from your vocabulary lightning round into the dialogue.[/li]
[li]How are Taiwanese people supposed to know what the question and other answers mean?[/li]
[li]To your grammar quiz:[list=1][]No, the latter sentence is grammatically incorrect. Superlative adjectives always demand a determiner for modifying noun phrases, even when the noun is a mass noun.[/li][li]‘Seeing’ is not a noun. It’s a string transformation from a sentence to a noun phrase which prompts the change. You also mess up the explanation on why we wouldn’t use “insist on to smoke.”[/li][li]The culprit in your second “rather than” sentence is ellipsis primarily, not “parallel construction.”[/li][/ol][/:m][/list:o]
Good things:
[ol][li]On YouTube, you could basically copy the Khan Academy model and lecture series, so could rewind and re-listen to crap that you missed. That means that the vocabulary lightning round doubles as a Chinese vocabulary drill![/li]
[li]The translated sentences also work to this effect, so long as you ignore the later F- grammatical explanations as provided by 笨蛋 Jack’s quiz.[/li][/ol]
Rant:
Is it a rule that all language learning materials must contain things like this and inject syntax lessons without any particular coherent reason for their placement? Can’t dialogues be lexically basic, and yet contain more real-life situations, ones that people actually would remember from day to day? Is it so hard to isolate structure and write memorable uses of it, rather than hoping that someone will somehow connect, for instance, eating at a restaurant or some other mundane activity with correct use of interrogative sentence structure? It’s like I landed on the Island of Misfit English Textbooks.
I think many parents here send their children to cram English primarily to impresses others (commonly can’t distinguish between English and Engrish). They’re usually not planning to relocate to an English speaking country or really to communicate in that language. They have Chinese for that.
I didn’t watch the clip, but I would point out that this is titled “English Translation Class (2nd year Vo-Tec School)”, not “English Class”. That may have something to do with assumptions about what people know going in. (But the general assessment of the quality of most English teaching programs – TV and radio – is not something I’ve ever seen much evidence against.)
Damn! You’re not kidding! Quite the drawl! 