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One-on-one class, what to do? | ||
Tags: Tutor | Study Plan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| james1 Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5632 days ago 121 posts - 145 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 12 04 September 2009 at 1:52am | IP Logged |
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I have a chance to study with a native speaker, one-on-one, 2 hours a week.
How do I get the most out of this time? Currently, I bring my notebook, with sentences. The sentences I found in books and movies. I practice saying them with the native speaker and ask questions. Hopefully, the native speaker will give me advice. I am curious as to what others do with private classes. What do you do? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lancemanion Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5580 days ago 150 posts - 166 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 12 05 September 2009 at 4:16am | IP Logged |
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What is your level? If it's intermediate or better, I recommend splitting the session in half, and have 1 hour
conversations twice per week. Conversation is the one thing you can't do by yourself, and it's often what we are most lacking. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6711 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 12 05 September 2009 at 6:46pm | IP Logged |
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I would suggest that you study grammar and vocabulary yourself outside class and insist on keeping every minute with your teacher in the target language.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Katie Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6726 days ago 495 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian Studies: French, German | Message 4 of 12 05 September 2009 at 11:18pm | IP Logged |
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I work one on one with a native speaker. I am lucky that she was also a school teacher in Hungary. Hungarian has quite complex grammar, so we work through this each week. We also read famous poems and talk about them, as well as short stories and having general conversation.
I would say that 95% of my class is in Hungarian - including grammatical explanations. It is only when it gets a little too difficult for me at my stage that we switch back to English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Kveldulv Senior Member Italy Joined 6961 days ago 222 posts - 244 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Italian* | Message 5 of 12 06 September 2009 at 10:51am | IP Logged |
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I'm interested, too.
The native speaker I'm talking about lives in my little town and is about twice my age. She is not formally trained to teach her own language. What would you do? What would you talk about considering our age gap? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Katie Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6726 days ago 495 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian Studies: French, German | Message 6 of 12 06 September 2009 at 11:10am | IP Logged |
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Just a suggestion... sometimes I will read a poem or a short story or article in Hungarian that interests me. I then take it to my class and we discuss it - not just the actual content, but also things like the cases it used, the choice of words, sentence structures etc.
[edited] I meant to say that, by taking along something that is of interest to you, it would perhaps make it a little easier to get the conversation going and keep it going. Edited by Katie on 06 September 2009 at 11:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6478 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 7 of 12 06 September 2009 at 8:15pm | IP Logged |
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I regularly have lessons with online teachers in Spanish, Modern Greek and Chinese, and each of them are a bit different.
As I'm a complete beginner in Spanish, I didn't think it would be possible to spend most of the time speaking Spanish, especially about things that actually interest me, but Enrique is a fabulous teacher and manages to manipulate the conversation in such a way that anybody can actually participate. With other teachers I have to make more of an effort to ensure the conversation doesn't languish. With my Chinese teacher, I actually mostly talk about things I'm interested in. We typically start by talking about what's going on in our lives and then we might arrive at talking about Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Go (Weiqi) or previous or current travels, history... anything. I make lots of mistakes and often have to ask for words or expressions, but I don't let that deter me as my wish is really to be able to talk about all these things in Chinese and the fastest way to get to that point is by actually talking about them, and learning whatever words and grammar I was missing. Similar for Greek, except my Greek is worse, so I do more grammar exercises with my teacher or ask her about things I came across while studying. Depending on the lesson, we only spend half to a quarter of the time actually freely talking in Greek, and for that time I have to ask for lots and lots of words. My teacher has to be very patient, and that's actually why I employ a teacher and don't do a tandem at this point. We typically only talk about one topic, which one of us has thought about before, and then after the lesson I know enough Greek to be able to talk about it easily. Edited by Sprachprofi on 06 September 2009 at 8:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| james1 Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5632 days ago 121 posts - 145 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 12 08 September 2009 at 4:23am | IP Logged |
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Thank you for the advice.
Does it help to continue on about the same subject or switch subjects? I want to have discussions about real estate, I could possibly talk about this everyday and get really good at it, I am interested in this subject. Or is it better to switch every week. Or does it matter, perhaps talking about anything of interest is best. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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