Using Mandarin as a plus to attract students to teach English to?

[Badger]

Hello, as an American, I have had a lot of opportunities while in China to teach english on the side. 

 

I surprisingly enjoyed the teaching (when it wasn't with a group of children under 6), and now that I am stuck in the US, I have been tutoring one of my students remotely (she is around 40).  This student definitely takes advantage of my Chinese and appreciates it.  Even as someone with a high level of Chinese, I would prefer someone as well who is fluent in English, as sometimes things come up that this is really helpful.  

 

My question is, I would like to find some more remote teaching jobs that I can help Chinese learners learn English as use my Chinese level and passion for language as an advantage to become more of a speciality/niche teacher.  Does anyone have any ideas about this and where I should go to find more students?

 

Cheers

Badger

[杰.克]

1 hour ago, Badger said:

As someone with a pretty , even at a high level of Chinese, I would prefer someone as well who is fluent in English, as sometimes things come up that this is really helpful.  

 

Im really struggling to understand what this sentence means? You have a pretty?

 

Always a tough one when you make an error in a post talking about being an english teacher ?  加油 op!

 

[Badger]

7 minutes ago, 杰.克 said:

Always a tough one when you make an error in a post talking about being an english teacher ?  加油 op!

 

Thanks for spotting that out, edited. 

[杰.克]

1 hour ago, Badger said:

Thanks for spotting that out, edited. 

 

All good my friend.

 

As for your dilemma i think you‘re in a tough spot. Finding students that want to learn english, but to be taught in Mandarin. Essentially your only going to be looking at beginners. I know from my perspective now,  I do not allow my Chinese teachers to speak a word of english to me. Its just not conducive at all to learning.

 

 

[edelweis]

16 minutes ago, Badger said:

Thanks for spotting that out, edited. 

You might want to check the thread title as well?

English is not my native language.

I think "too" should be "to" but I could be wrong.

[feihong]

12 hours ago, Badger said:

My question is, I would like to find some more remote teaching jobs that I can help Chinese learners learn English as use my Chinese level and passion for language as an advantage to become more of a speciality/niche teacher.  Does anyone have any ideas about this and where I should go to find more students?

Technically, this sort of job exists but you won’t have any access to it outside of China. There are coaches who train Chinese actors to deliver certain lines in English. Here, the focus is nearly 100% on pronunciation, as the actor simply needs to say the line correctly, they have no real need to understand what they’re saying, so the instruction can be entirely in Chinese. However, I’m almost certain you cannot do this remotely, and it probably doesn’t pay well either.

[道艺]

My suggestion would be to go through companies in an industry you are familiar with and offer english classes to their employees. You could probably end up getting them sponsored by the boss if you do a group thing or a package deal, granted your Chinese and English knowledge is tailored to their industry

[Demonic_Duck]

On 8/2/2020 at 4:24 AM, feihong said:

There are coaches who train Chinese actors to deliver certain lines in English. ... It probably doesn’t pay well either.

 

Any basis for the pay not being great? I can't imagine jobs like this would be easy to find - you'd probably need good connections in the industry and perhaps more of a specialized linguistics background - but given that increased specialization, you'd expect the pay to be at least decent.

 

I guess the flipside of that is that a lot of filmmakers would consider correct pronunciation of foreign languages to be very low priority, so they'd just hire the closest native speaker they could find and pay them a pittance. Which is presumably why the result is often so laughably bad.

[Shelley]

I would say that being able to speak the language of the people you are teaching English to does make a difference. My first and my favourite Chinese teacher was English but had been born in Shanghai and lived there till she was 12 or so. She was of an age that the reason her family left was the troubles in Shanghai.

She loved Chinese and spent many years with her teacher perfecting her Chinese. 

The advantage, especially when you first start, is that things can be explained in your language. Some people feel this is not the best way but in the beginning it helped a lot.

 

However your English must be as good as your Chinese or visa versa.

From your original post I suspect that English is not your first language. If it is, I feel you need to brush up on grammar and spelling. Personally I feel your sentence construction is clumsy, not exactly wrong but not well crafted.

 

If you are trying to make a point about your English being useful, if I was you, I would have ensured my fist post was spotless when it came to my writing skills. You have however edited some of the mistakes that I also spotted, so it does scan a bit better.

 

[feihong]

4 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

Any basis for the pay not being great? I can't imagine jobs like this would be easy to find - you'd probably need good connections in the industry and perhaps more of a specialized linguistics background - but given that increased specialization, you'd expect the pay to be at least decent.

I have no experience in the entertainment industry, but given the less-than-stellar results on most Chinese shows, I would expect they’re not paying much. Also, not sure the demand for pronunciation coaches is that great when so many productions have foreign extras now, just grab one of them and drill for several minutes before the shoot.

 

Maybe working on movies would be more lucrative, like if you’re working directly with a famous actor that really doesn’t want to flub their English lines, but I bet you need really good connections to get that kind of gig. I actually knew someone who said he directly worked with Fan Bingbing, which is why I thought of this in the first place. But I don’t know how he got the job, and obviously he isn’t doing it anymore.