no native speaker

[macius]

Ni men hao!

I'm polish student (20y) and i would like to go to China for about 6 months. I speak polish and german fluently, i have good command od english and i speak also spanish and russian. Do you know something about opportunities of teaching english or german in China if you are not native speaker or professional language teacher? Is it possible? I'm looking for any opportunity to go to China because i wanna improve my command of chinese.

[cjbaker]

Yes, I once met a Ukrainian teaching English in Beijing. Chinese people I know say that there will be opportunities to teach non-English languages in the coming years because of the Olympics...I'm not sure if that's true.

[Kiwijes]

When I stayed in Beijing last year (Oct 05) my entire hotel was full of Germans. When I went shopping, other westerners would talk to me in German assuming I was too, and when I went to restaurants we were surrounded by more Germans. So from this I am guessing that there HAS to be a market somewhere for someone who can speak German as I definately encountered more Germans in Beijing than I did any other "western" nationality! Good luck!

[WoAiJolinTsai]

^^^ I've always encountered more Americans in every big Chinese city. I don't know what you are talking about.

[nitropuppy]

What if it's just americans faking it by speaking a little german? Just to add to the confusion.

[Kiwijes]

Ha ha. I was thinking that maybe Germany had some cheap deals on flights to Beijing that month!?

[Hero Doug]

There are opportunities for non-native speakers of course, but you need to be careful because I've seen some schools basically be bluntly biased towards non-natives. Half or significantly less money if fairly common in my experience. I even suggested someone for part-time work at a school (Chinese American) and she C.M. was outraged at the suggestion and shot it down quicker then, well, most anything (EF ChangSha by the way, stay away from that school, this isn't the place for why, but I can elaborate).

Also your English needs to be good obviously. Not sure about teaching German, maybe you could contact Universities directly and propose it to them. Maybe they'd open it up for a semester or be able to give you a referral.