Teaching Chinese to a beginner

[mrkarahan]

Hi There!

I graduated from Sinology deprtment and studied Chinese for 4 years totally.

I even studied Chinese one year in China.

But it has been more then 2 years that I am working for a special company as

and import export manager and I wanna give Chinese lessons to beginner level

persons.

Which way should I follow first? and where to start?

If anybody give me some advise, I would appreciate that.

Regards

[Meng Lelan]

Depends on whether you want to do private tutoring or teach classes. If you want to teach classes, contact your local Confucius Institute. If you also have a master's in Chinese contact your local community college. They may have teaching opportunities.

[mrkarahan]

Thanks for your reply.

Yes I want to do private tutoring.

I dont know from which part of Chinese should I start.

I need a road map.

Thanks

[Erbse]

You could buy a beginners book and use that to teach.

[Meng Lelan]

Yes I want to do private tutoring.

I dont know from which part of Chinese should I start.

I need a road map.

I would advise you to get at least two or three sets of beginner texts, for example, Volumes 1 and 2 of NPCR, Volumes 1 and 2 of the Great Wall Hanyu series, and if you are teaching trad characters then Volumes 1 and 2 of the Practical Audio Visual Chinese series. Get the workbooks too. Go through those series to help you design a road map of where to start. You do have to start with pinyin and basic greetings then move on from there. Make sure you know what the student is wanting. For example students may want to just learn to speak and listen, or may want to just read and write characters. Some students want to go to any Chinese speaking country and some students want to go to just Taiwan or just the mainland or something like that.

[mrkarahan]

Thanks for your detailed reply.

Indeed I think most of the people interested in learning chinese are attracted by

chinese calligraphy.

So I will try to teach them the order of strokes and some speaking.

I have one set of learning chinese set with Dvd's.It is great wall.

Ok anyway thank you so much.

Regards

Emre

[Pendragon]

Your main challenge may be to keep the students motivated.

Most textbooks for learning Chinese are basically quite good (I liked 我的汉语教室), but sometimes it's frustrating to study chapter after chapter and still be unable to buy a train ticket or understand a Chinese menu. So make sure you get to know what your student wants to do in Chinese (talk about a sport he likes; order food from a Chinese menu etc) and focus on this, even if it's not in the textbook. For example I asked my teacher for the names of all common ingredients in Chinese cooking so I could use a cooking book on my own, even though such words often only appear in an intermediate or advanced textbook. Also these kinds of skills are nice, small modules you can complete in a short time, adding to the sense of progress.

Also I think you should teach vocabulary in context: words in sentences and collocations, not lists of isolated words with their definition (as is common in textbooks). You can even get creative with 'mind maps', I use them to learn relatively difficult words or characters.

Good luck!