pancake Posted March 6, 2010 at 04:41 PM Report Posted March 6, 2010 at 04:41 PM Hi all, I plan on hiring a private tutor in Harbin to supplement the teaching at HIT. I was thinking of how to utilise s/he and stumbled upon this blog post, which I found very inspiring. The idea is to use the natural language environment, instead of learning from "the book of 10000 idioms" or contrived textual examples to illustrate some grammar point. The only thing I don't like about the approach outlined is that I would find it difficult to plan activities for each day, and that some of it would seem to overly intrude on the tutor's private life (Like the proposal to read the tutor's private email). My plan, then, is to modify the approach by instead using a simulacrum of real life: the soap opera. Basically, each lesson could focus on one episode of some Chinese soap opera. I would then be able to prepare transcripts, unfamiliar vocabulary etc. beforehand to make the teaching process smoother. The ideal would be to find some show that, as closely as possible, shows Chinese life. Preferably one without any clever script writing and with bog-standard prosaic language. I am thinking that a Chinese equivalent of the British "Eastenders" or "Coronation Street" would do perfectly. My post here, then, is to: 1) Solicit opinions about the idea in general. Is it stupid? Could it be modified to be even better? 2) Get suggestions for TV-shows having the aforementioned desirable qualities. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! Quote
Lu Posted March 6, 2010 at 05:53 PM Report Posted March 6, 2010 at 05:53 PM Have you checked out the Grand First Episode Project? It's in the Film and Television subforum. There also has been a project to watch an entire Chinese tv series, it's a few years ago I think, but that's also in that subforum. You can plunge right in. The blog post idea is fun, but I wonder how useful it would really be. You need to have some basis in a language for it to be useful, I think, otherwise you only understand one in ten words, and that's not a very productive way of learning. Personally I wouldn't mind the email thing, I send and receive enough completely mundane emails to make it a very minor intrusion of my privacy. Especially if you can edit out parts you don't want your student to know. Quote
renzhe Posted March 6, 2010 at 09:09 PM Report Posted March 6, 2010 at 09:09 PM Yes, have a look here. Lots of recommendations, and there are quite a few people using TV shows to get listening practice and hear words in context. Just read through the thing and pick something you like, but if soap operas are your thing, then 奋斗 is probably what you want. There are considerable resources (summaries, vocab lists) in that thread, which will help you prepare your lessons in advance. The show also follows young people and covers a wide range of situations, from weddings to funerals, from love to job search, and everything in between. You could watch it, then pick out the tricky parts and practice that with your tutor. Or try to find all the examples of a grammar rule you covered in class that week. Just a word of caution -- this alone doesn't equal a good language program. It sounds like you are seeing this as a complement to regular classes, and this is the right way to approach it. You should be following a good course to give you structure, but you should be doing lots of listening and conversation whenever you can to supplement it. If you do it like this, you'll get great results. Quote
pancake Posted March 7, 2010 at 06:46 AM Author Report Posted March 7, 2010 at 06:46 AM Thanks Lu and Renzhe! I had completely missed that first episodes thing, seems like a great resource so thanks for that. I will go with Renzhe's suggestion of 奋斗. Hey, if I don't like it I can always switch to one of those historical dramas that seem to comprise 70% of CCTV programming. And just to clarify: this will only be used as a complement the 20 hours/week I already get from my institution. Maybe it will also gradually wean me from my bad habit of watching English language TV, this weekend I had an "Arrested Development" marathon. Funniest. Show. Ever. Quote
abcdefg Posted March 7, 2010 at 02:41 PM Report Posted March 7, 2010 at 02:41 PM Every day is a field trip...Think of your tutor as a surrogate mother more than anything else. I've done exactly that with several different tutors in several different Chinese cities over the course of several years as a way of supplementing more formal and comprehensive language classes. We generally would first go out for about an hour and either do an errand or just walk around unfamiliar streets without a specific task or destination. I would ask questions along the way, take "what is that?" snapshots and jot things down. During interactions with locals along the way, we found that if I asked a newspaper vendor a question, he would tend to direct his answer to my tutor and look to her for clarification. So we devised a ruse. If I wanted to ask how much something cost in a shop, or what time the movie started, or what that book in the bookstore was about, or how to get my phone repaired, my Chinese tutor pretended she was Korean or Japanese and was just visiting me here in China. She kept mum until we left the premises and gave no clue that she could speak the language. She never intervened. Then we would return to the classroom and spend the remaining hour talking about what had taken place. She would write out words I had heard, discuss the grammar of the actual interactions and I could ask related questions. I would later transfer useful vocabulary to flash cards for review and also go over other "daily language" points which I wanted to remember so I could use them again in similar situations. . It usually takes a little persuading to get your tutor to realize you value that kind of learning experience as much as if she had been droning through a textbook lesson mindlessly and writing boring stuff on the blackboard. You will have to reassure her that you don’t feel cheated and you will probably have to build her up a bit by telling her how much you appreciate her willingness to indulge your unconventional approach to keep her from feeling as though she isn’t really doing her job like a "real teacher" should. But it has always been well worth it, and I heartily recommend giving it a try. In fact I'm still using a similar strategy even now. Quote
pancake Posted March 7, 2010 at 03:38 PM Author Report Posted March 7, 2010 at 03:38 PM abcdefg: Wow, thanks for sharing that! I'll make sure to try it too, as for now I have just spent too much of my time in transcribing episode 1, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let it all go to waste. Quote
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