How to organise time with private tutors

[stapler]

I was thinking about Tamu's post and have been considering going out and paying people to speak to me in Chinese. I don't want to do a language exam because I fear that in it'll quickly descend into large amounts of English. By making it a financial agreement I hope it keep that at bay. But I was wondering how I could make the best use of my time with a language tutor. Tamu mentioned stuff like drilling, but didn't provide much other information about what he actually did during his sessions. I fear that my own sessions would just turn into asking the usual generic introduction questions then the conversation petering out. Has anyone else done anything similar (aka, not formal lessons, but just paying people to talk to you, drill you, correct your mistakes) and able to tell me how they organise their tutoring sessions to get the most out of them?

[889]

If you can find a tutor who'll do rapid-fire drills you've found a treasure. Intensive drilling is hard work for the tutor, and very very few will put in the effort to do it properly. I certainly never found anyone who would do it right.

Lacking a good tutor for drills -- and you probably will -- then you have to prepare each session ahead yourself and use other methods. E.g., read that newspaper article beforehand and mark out phrases and constructions you don't understand.

Hopefully, your tutor will at least be able to recognise your weak areas. So if it's being understood when speaking -- probably the most common problem of Chinese learners -- work on that mostly. Remember that a good tutor needs training and experience; just being a native speaker isn't enough. (Without training, could you teach a Chinese person to differentiate tread and dread?)

Nonetheless, for better or worse it's up to you get the most out of the sessions. Otherwise, as you said, you'll just end up with chit chats. Which means that if it's not working out, you have to be prepared to move on.

 

[Lu]

It depends a bit on how much time you can put into preparation, how experienced your tutor is and how much time she is willing/able to put into preparation. Best is if you can find an actual Chinese teacher, whom you can tell what you want to work on and who then knows how to go about teaching you that. In that case, there's no need for you to prepare any more than just your homework as given by the tutor. If you just find a random Chinese person, you need to prepare the subject matter yourself. Find an article, or a story, or a youtube video, or whatever you'd like to talk about, in Chinese; prepare it, go over all difficulties, think of a few debating points etc; and then take all that to your tutor.

[querido]

In practice, providing a list of sentences which I have already studied is working better than either wordlists or whole texts, or new material. The tutor reads and I ensure that I understand everything. She makes substitutions (breakfast > dinner, eggs > steak) and we ensure that I still understand. Then I look at the list and do the same thing with her. One sentence makes me think of another and I connect them myself. We have micro-conversations built from them.

 

This way, I have already done everything I can do alone on my own time and my time with the teacher is precious L2-L2 moments, at first a few seconds but getting longer.

 

Wordlists turned out to be unnecessarily challenging and whole texts tend to lock us in to parroting someone else's conversation.

[anonymoose]

If you're going to pay, why don't you want formal lessons? If you're going to pay, the tutor should be putting in enough prep time to make it an effective lesson. If it's not, then you've got the wrong tutor.

 

I've not had a personal tutor before, but I think I might find one just to see if I've been missing out.

[Silent]

 

 

Has anyone else done anything similar (aka, not formal lessons, but just paying people to talk to you, drill you, correct your mistakes) and able to tell me how they organise their tutoring sessions to get the most out of them?

Not really sure what the difference is between lessons and what you want. I'ld say if you pay them they should work for it in order to help you learn. Maybe your solution is a bit cheaper as you'll hire a non qualified teacher. It is however likely that this will be less effective and/or have to put in more effort yourself. Unless you hire them to help you with one very specific issue.

 

 

 

 I fear that my own sessions would just turn into asking the usual generic introduction questions then the conversation petering out.

Just random talking can be hard indeed, though some people just chat away. Nevertheless if you rely on spontaneous subjects it's likely you will keep repeating more or less the same things over and over. Not necessarily bad, but you do risk effectiveness.  This can be solved, as already suggested, by choosing news articles and alike to discuss.

 

My teacher selects news articles. We usually read and discuss these during the lesson, Then as homework I write something about the subject and mail it. The next lesson my teacher has corrected my essay, we go through the errors and maybe discuss a little more. A comparable approach would also be possible for language exchange, converstation partners or whatever. 

[Guest realmayo]

In case it's helpful, I started learning Chinese one-on-one with a tutor. At that time I wasn't interested in learning characters or anything long-term, I just wanted to be able to chat a bit with Chinese people. After the first couple of lessons with a textbook, we rarely used it. Instead my teacher asked me questions and I replied. Whenever I didn't know how to say something -- a word or a piece of grammar -- he'd tell me, he'd write it down, I'd write it down. Before the next class I'd practise the things I'd written down. And my teacher would prepare a list of questions/drills using  those items. So the next lesson he would ask if I remembered how to say x, then he'd drill me with a bunch of questions using x.

 

These initial conversations started as basic as: 

- Are you French?

- No I'm not

- Are you German?

- No. Oh, how do you say neither...nor as in neither French nor German'?

 

... and then the next lesson would have a drill on using neither...nor

 

I made good and easy progress this way but perhaps it all hinged upon having a teacher who put in the preparation time and who I got on really well with so it was nice to spend an hour or two basically just chatting every week.

[Flickserve]

After a hiatus, I have restarted my lessons. I find a mixture of the above methods works for me at this moment in time. I haven't done language exchange yet, until I feel I can use a bit more vocabulary. I also prefer to pay for tutoring so I use the time as much as possible on Chinese.

Different methods for different purposes and it's an individual preference how much weighting you put in each method.

[stapler]

Thanks for all your replies. Hope they keep coming with more examples of what you guys do.

 

The reason why I asked specifically about non-professional tutorials is 1) I don't think I could afford a professional one and 2) tamu seemed to suggest that people without experience where often better for his needs. In addition to all that the main reason why I was thinking of paying someone (though no as much a professional tutor) was to help reduce the amount of English that would be used in a language swap. Basically every single Chinese person I could contact here has a fairly advanced English level. So I worry that there will be a constant temptation to fall back into that. Ideally I'd like to speak to a Chinese person who knows no English and doesn't want to learn it. But finding that kind of person outside of China is difficult.

 

I think my best bet might be just to go with a language swap, but really prepare a lot myself.

[Flickserve]

I haven't looked back at Tamu's thread but if I recall correctly, you would probably need to reach a certain proficiency level to do the same thing.

I still think it's a judgement call on the english proficiency of the 'tutor'. At my level, I still need to use some english. I am expecting to use it less and less if I advance further. So far, it's me that is the one using English more rather than the tutor. At the moment, I type some English into Skype as opposed to saying it. Then the tutor says the chinese word (or sentence) and gives me the Chinese characters which is fine by me.

Did you try the Praat software? Highly recommended to try it out.

[stapler]

My weakest area by far is my speaking and communication. I think my grasp of grammar and read ability is okay. But because of my environment and what I've been studying my communication abilities are well below my comprehension abilities. This means I'd primarily want to use a tutor as the chance to develop my communication rather than clarify grammar questions etc.

[Shelley]

I would like to suggest TPRS. Have a look at this   http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/46693-any-experience-with-tprs/

 

I had a few taster sessions with Eszter and was very impressed.

 

It was good for improving my speech and grammar, and learning new vocabulary,

 

 

 

[stapler]

Thanks looks interesting. I'll look into it.