How to choose right spoken-Chinese teacher?
First point:
What are the characteristics of a good Chinese teacher?
“Good” does not refer to the school from which the teacher graduated, and even the teaching age cannot be considered absolutely（but can be used as an important reference standard，experience is still of great use）.To find a good teacher, we must first be active in the classroom, ask various questions, and see if this teacher is talking nonsense and fooling you.Questions can be asked in detail from the following aspects:
1.Teaching material for me:
Good teachers do not choose books with special academic background as beginner materials,they have many high-quality teaching resources, such as PPT made by themselves;learning videos with appropriate difficulty;tailor-made
homework,large amount of review plans, and high-quality learning websites recommended to you.
2.The key and difficult points of teaching are clear:
No matter what the character of the students, professional teachers will not try to teach many knowledge points at the beginning, such as pronunciation, intonation, Chinese character writing, grammar, etc. Usually, teachers will grasp a key point and let students really master this key content in this class, which is better than teaching all but failing to learn a single knowledge point. They usually choose some simple and commonly used phrases and sentences to practice. After a class of training, they can usually remember a few short sentences, feel a sense of achievement, and build confidence in learning Chinese.
3.Do I Feel sleepy？
Good spoken-Chinese teachers don’t make students feel bored
Interest is the most original power to learn all knowledge, and also one of the most important standards to measure whether a teacher is professional. If you feel sleepy every time on the class, either the teacher has no experience in mobilizing the classroom atmosphere, or they do not have sufficient preparation before class. Sufficient preparation include the understanding of students’ Chinese level, the definition of teaching objectives, and the textbooks and teaching aids,some teachers will even learn about students’ personalities and preferences from the process of chatting, so that they can better integrate knowledge points into students’ interests and quickly catch their attention.
4.Is this course difficult for me?
Good teachers will not make Chinese difficult to learn
We usually introduce the pronunciation of Chinese tones and vowels in our first lesson, but it must not take more than 5 minutes to practice pronunciation, because even if you spend a whole class in this part, they can not learn completely correct pronunciation, which can easily cause frustration. Experienced teachers usually do not take such a risk, because once they leave the impression that Chinese is difficult to learn, this class is a failure for they destroy the students’ confidence.
5.Do I like this teacher?
Professional Chinese teacher usually very natural and approachable
This is a little different from our cognition. Experienced teachers usually don’t show off their experience, let alone show a lot of evidence that they are professional. If your teacher often mentions his or her title, academic status, academic achievements, authority, etc, you should be careful that these may not always be the truth.
6.Good speaking teachers don’t use much English.
When the teacher speaks English, the students will also communicate and think in English. Such a class can make the students have little time to practice using Chinese, let alone think in Chinese.
As long as they get used to the stage of immersive learning, beginners will be thinking in Chinese.
Why so easy?
Think about how we learned languages as children:
We imitate our parents’ mouth shape and body language
Likewise, a good Chinese teacher will explain the meaning of complex words through body language, props, examples and simple words to translate complex words. It is beliveved the best teacher is the one who can teach a lesson clearly without using English, and the students will realize this and appreciate the method.
Second point:
What are the characteristics of professional oral Chinese courses？
It is difficult for beginners to distinguish whether a course has been carefully designed and polished by simply taking several classes. The following features can help you quickly identify:
1.Weakened Learning of Chinese Character Writing
Every Chinese learner wants to be able to talk in Chinese. Many students hope that they can understand Chinese websites, newspapers and books; Most people will also need to send messages and emails in Chinese, but only a small number of people will need to write with pen and paper. What many Chinese students, including many Chinese teachers, do not understand is that learning to speak and read does not require mastering Chinese characters writing.
2.Use sound materials to learn
Language is a series of sounds. In order to use a foreign language fluently, we must do two things:
Learn to understand the different meanings of different sounds;
Learn to form those sounds in the right order.
Of course, reading, writing and grammar will help you learn the language. But if your goal is to understand and speak a language fluently, it is absolutely not necessary to learn reading, writing and grammar.
Think of a four or five year old child.
Does the child of that age already know a lot of characters?
How many Chinese characters can he write?
How many grammar textbooks did he read at that time?
How many grammar exercises did he do?
But can he speak and understand what parents and friends say?
It is through the sound (that is, the words of the parents, cartoons, etc.) to learn their mother tongue..
Unfortunately, by the time they go to school and start learning a foreign language, their teachers try to teach them spoken language through written content。
An effective spoken Chinese course that is best taught to beginners through the sound of Chinese only. During the first few months, students will not be allowed to read or write any words.
When they have learned speaking and listening to a certain level and can speak Chinese freely with others for 10 minutes, they should start learning reading and typing through pinyin. At that time, the student who has learned to speak a lot of words will quickly learn to read words that he already understands. His reading progress will be much faster than a student trying to learn speaking, listening, reading and writing Chinese characters at the same time.
3.Teaching with context
Teaching with context means to let students practice a useful dialogue in each class, which can be daily dialogues, cartoons, inspirational videos, or movie dialogues. The key point is: there must be a sense of picture. for example:
A.你好。B. 你好。
A.我的名字叫TOM,你呢? B. 我叫Jerry。你是老师吗？
A.是啊，在mandarinclass101.com教中文，你呢？
B.我是留学生，你有空教教我把
A.没问题
For someone who is just starting to learn Chinese, a conversation above is already quite challenging. He will need to listen and repeat it many times to learn it. A good course will adjust the difficulty of the conversation according to the progress of the students. Good teachers choose the right content based on their students’ personal backgrounds.
If you see here so far, it means that you really want to learn Chinese well, and you already know how to choose a good spoken-Chinese teacher. Follow us to learn more Chinese learning knowledge that is helpful to you.
-Many beginners find Chinese difficult to learn.
These students usually work very hard, buy a lot of Chinese lesson, try them out as soon as they have a trial class, and they have changed a lot of spoken-Chinese teachers.
What confuses them is that after spending a lot of time studying, they found that the pronunciation problems they encountered were not resolved. After a long time, they came to the wrong conclusion that Chinese was too difficult and that they lacked language talent.
In fact, this is a misunderstanding of learning Chinese.
As the saying goes:
There is no student cannot be taught well, only teacher knows not how to teach.
What they lack is not the right way to learn, but a teacher who can guide them.
If you also have the above questions, please think carefully about two questions:
What makes a good language teacher for you?
How do I choose suitable one for myself ?
Grasp the following two points,and then you will have a clear judgment standard in your heart. This article shares these methods, giving students who are looking for a Chinese teacher a path of hope.
