Making the most of 1 on 1 classes.

[zander1]

Heya, as the title of the topic says I am looking for some advice about how to make the most of 1 on 1 classes – i.e. what is the best use of my time. I’ve read around in the forums as much as I can (posts from Imron and Realmayo among others have been very useful) but I am still not entirely sure about what people think is the best course of action.

 

Some background: My Chinese is at a firmly intermediate level (in speaking and listening, which is what I am asking about here) and I’ve been studying for the last 4 years on and off although with a big almost 2 year break in the middle. I’m currently living in China and will be until around July next year. My Chinese has improved dramatically in the last 7 weeks or so, so I do wonder if I should just stick with what I am doing at the moment, but I do think my time could be used more efficiently and proactively

 

How I am currently studying: I have 4 hours of 1 on 1 class from Monday-Friday each week, in these classes I will talk casually with my teachers usually on a random topic. If I encounter a word I don’t understand or didn’t know how to say and it seems useful I will make a flashcard of the word and get my teachers to record a sentence of two demonstrating how to use the word on Anki. At this rate I am currently adding about 15 or so new words each day, which seems to be a reasonable rate as I am maintaining a solid 90% retention rate on Anki. I am also getting a lot of listening and speaking practice, as apart from making the flashcards we pretty much talk the entire class.

 

Recently, I have also noticed I have pronunciation problems particularly with tones and have set aside around 45 minutes of each day to try and drill tones in sentences. This is also one of the main reasons I want to change as various Chinese people have told me my tones are rubbish (hey, I guess it's better than being cheered for saying Ni hao right?!).

 

The reason I think I should change: After reading Realmayo’s posts as well as an interesting article on HackingChinese the consensus seems to be that you should try and prioritise in class the sort of learning that you cannot do elsewhere (i.e. on your own in self-study). In this sense, the obvious area to focus on would be pronunciation and tones as I can get real time feedback on this from a (hopefully!) patient native speaker.

 

For this reason, I am considering changing my method of learning to one in which I ask my teachers to be very strict, asking them to point out and explain every single tone/pronunciation error I make as well as any grammatical mistakes or errors in sentence structure (I think? this is how Realmayo studied in Taiwan). Obviously a consequence of this may be that the conversation will be less flowing and thus I will get less time to actually speak but I will know that what I have said is at least correct. Vocabulary accumulation can be done in other ways e.g. Chinesepod.

 

Would appreciate any advice! I am about to move schools and with my new teachers would like to get off the ground running in the best way.

[889]

I agree that's a great way to go. Look at the tone exercises in DeFrancis, for example, and use them.

 

The problem I suspect, is finding a teacher who's willing to put the effort into hard drills. It takes a lot of concentration on the part of the teacher, not to mention it's pretty boring. That is, it's real work. So much easier just to chat with you for an hour. (Myself, I never found a teacher in China who was willing to use the hard drill approach, at least more than half-heartedly.)

[Flickserve]

Probably two or three teachers need to be rotated if you are going to be doing four hours a day of such work. I can't imagine one teacher doing such work four hours a day.

Record the lesson and the program "praat" to check your tones. There is a great post by Tamu on it.

[Guest realmayo]

Yes the OP may be confusing me with Tamu and his posts about learning in Taiwan.

 

But I too have had four hours 1-on-1 before and used part of that time to make a big effort on correcting tones and other pronunciation faults. I basically tried to spend the first hour of every class every day on pronunciation. After that it was freer conversation, although the teacher would still pull me up on pronunciation errors occasionally, if it was a word that I always said wrong, or an example of a sound/tone that we'd been working on at the start of that class that I was starting to get wrong again.

 

889 and flickserve make a good point, that you rely on a teacher being prepared to work strictly with you -- in my case, like I say, this was for one of the four hours each day. And it's tiring for both parties at the end of it. Because the teacher has to gauge at what point to 'give up' for the day on a particular sound, while hopefully making a note to return to it the next day.

 

Things that worked for me:

 

- Print-out of the pinyin chart

- Teacher reads out individual sounds and you have to work out the pinyin/tone

- Ditto but for two-character, three-character, four-character words, getting faster and faster

(Any sounds you're not always able to distinguish clearly when listening, you'll almost certainly have problems saying correctly too)

- You read through the pinyin chart in all tones, teacher listens and notes weaknesses

- Work on the weaknesses, both as individual sounds and as parts of words or very short sentences

- Scribble notes so after class you can remind yourself of the 'wrong way' you've been producing a sound

- As flickserve says, record the lesson and play around with praat: not just on your tones, but feed audio from textbook mp3s into it too, it's interesting how much variation such native-speech actually has when it comes to tones, and praat will show you that variation. Or at least, it might show you that your idea of what a particular tone should be is actually different from how it appears in native-speech, even if hyper-correct speech recorded for textbooks.

 

An hour of that every day helped me. For the rest of the class, can be less strict but if a specific problem you've just been working on starts to reappear in freer conversation, it's helpful if the teacher can point that out immediately.

[zander1]

Yes apologies realmayo think I have got a bit confused!

 

I'd like to clarify I don't mean spending the entire four hours on tone drills (although I did do this the other day, it's kind of hellish) but just asking the teacher to maintain a high standard on pronunciation and grammar for the entire lesson - which I think is what Tamu did in Taiwan.

[abcdefg]

In addition to the suggestions above by Realmayo and others, I once had a strict one-to-one teacher who printed out a couple paragraphs of Chinese (Hanzi) text double spaced and had me write the proper Pinyin mark for each syllable right above it. We started each class like that.

 

What that did was to quickly dispel the personal myth that I actually knew the right tone deep down in some secret place in my soul even when I didn't say it correctly out loud in conversation. Sometimes I just plain didn't know the right tone: maybe I had learned it wrong or forgotten it over time. I also sometimes messed up tone changes that depend on what sound precedes and what follows.

 

Eventually I had to do similar drills on my own with larger pieces of not-too-difficult native reading material (written in Chinese Hanzi characters.) The mistakes that I made over and over soon became obvious to both of us, myself and my teacher. After that we devised strategies to hammer them out by means of "memory hooks" and plenty of repetition.

 

And I think this is very important: (from Realmayo's post just above)

 

Or at least, it might show you that your idea of what a particular tone should be is actually different from how it appears in native-speech, even if hyper-correct speech recorded for textbooks.

 

Equally important as the individual tone or tones of each word, is the overall pattern of phrases and sentences: what parts gets emphasis, what parts don't, what parts of the sentence speed up, what parts slow down, what parts rise and what parts fall.

 

I once had a (different) one-to-one teacher who was an opera singer and poet by trade and only teaching Chinese temporarily for extra money. She pushed hard on such things, which are often overlooked in a classroom setting.