Move to China after living in Japan for 3 years, to a rural area in Hunan.
Friend says he has a great teacher to buff his Chinese from Sichuan, and they have really interesting political conversations. My level is about A2 - lived in Beijing for years but never worked at it for more than a few months at a time, and knew a lot of Japanese previously which interferes.
Was browsing Chinese teachers on here: https://www.italki.com/teachers/chinese. Suddenly decide to sign up for 10 lessons with an older professional teacher
Somewhat suffer through it - it's standard unoptimized government school style, and I haven't spoken or studied in about 5 years. My earlier level was about A2 on the EU scale.
Still feel enthusiastic about having someone to fix all my grammar mistakes, but realize I should get a younger teacher who I have more in common with and who would be more flexible.
Have signed up for a bunch of trial lessons with much better teachers. I'm up to 2 classes in the morning, 2 in the evening, to match China time. Interesting people here - a funny girl who lives in Malta with her bf who likes teaching me very detailed written grammar. An expat Chinese living in Japan who wanted to teach glamorous, sophisticated sounding words and expressions like “搁浅 - stranded”.
Getting into the swing of it now. All lessons are freeform by this point. And I have a few new things I like to do:
My lesson plan: I think of an old movie, and come up with a list of words to explain it. What movie is this?
Then I write out a few sentences and try to tell the story.
I have 3-4 classes/day and every day I tell the same story in ever class, getting corrections. Some teachers are strict on pronunciation, others focus on grammar, etc. By trying to tell the same long, emotional story, and really trying to get them to understand it, I get super motivated and also get tons of practice. (Doing this at age 42).
Have kept doing this and moved comfortably into B2-B1 range. Now I also tell short stories from my scifi reading group - get to learn lots of words that I care about - alien, ship, floating, space, etc. And because the stories all have a hook, the key scientific element they have to understand to really get the story, I have strong motivation. Memorable stories I told in Chinese: "9 Lives" by Ursula Le Guin - the story of 8 identical genius clones, raised together, and what happens to them when 7 are killed and one is left alone. Another successful but very tough story to tell was Song for Lya, by George R R Martin.
Covering tons of grammar in classes, and getting lots of repetition. There is another level of really knowing a language beyond "being able to remember the anki card" - it's when you know a word because you've used it 20 times in class.
Morning classes from 8-10. Then an hour or two of anki before it gets too late. Then 3-4 classes in the evening. I would also do some preparation with docs, mining the skype chats & shared google docs for useful words, and doing story preparation.
So overall italki was awesome. In 5 months I did 360 lessons. I eventually found some teachers I stuck with for 30-40+ classes, usually meeting each one 2-3 times a week. Cost: about 10-15$/hour per class. Why did I stop? Work got busy and I no longer had any time in the evening.
Definitely; as soon as I have that kind of free time.
I think brain-wise there is a threshold of 2-3 classes a day where your resistance to just "being" in a language gives up. So I think returns are higher above that level. But it may still be linear for all I know.
I'd build up hundreds of words in a sort of "intermediate" state where I'd kind of know the definition, but not really know the usage. I'd try to use them, and every once in a while I'd hit one and could feel it crystalize into a word I know. And it really felt like a single point in time this would happen. And from then on, the word would come out whenever without "reaching".
Around this point there would be so many words in flux, I would identify clusters of 5-10 related words, all in that state at the same time, and would feel pressure write them all down in groups and spend a lesson going over them, making examples with the teacher. That was great fun - talking about every possible way to break/crack/shred/destroy/demolish/bust/ something. There are actually tons of such classes of words in Chinese - feels like as many as in English.
It is super fun to browse Italki teacher profiles and watch videos here: https://www.italki.com/teachers/chinese while just thinking that these are all people who've made it. They got through the drudgery of setting this all up, and are on track to expand their worlds. My part in this will be to just try to listen to them, show them my way of thinking, and be grateful for their sincere patience and desire to help.
Relationships with teachers in this way is interesting. The new teachers talk about everything; ones farther in keep it professional, and I adopted this method too. Early teacher relationships can be intense because you literally talk and look at each other continuously, while feeling very strong emotions and trying to express yourself as hard as you can; while they're trying to understand you sincerely and with a sense of forgiveness.
Asian language teachers often have really well-produced videos - is this the influence of TikTok? I've watched italki teacher intros from all around the world and it's interesting how much local culture comes out. Finnish teachers - embody Finn stereotypes.
How much should you judge people based their video? Sound quality definitely is important. Is there a real correlation between intro video sound quality, and their internet/mic setup & usage during a real lesson? Hard for there not to be, on average. Towards the end I became extremely picky about sound quality - no matter how good a teacher is, if sound sucks then it's no good.
What is the value of experience? Older teachers set in their ways? But young ones inexperienced? Pretty big cultural gradient between 25 and 40+. I found teachers < 25 were a bit lazy and loose, very tolerant but without enough fiber or propriety to push me to do things right. And older say >50 were harder to communicate with; typically had worse internet connections; harder to interrupt or derail.
Depending on the software used by the teacher, sometimes you have a full screen rather close up view of the teacher's face. This is a really intimate connection - you can see how everything you say effects them and their reaction, little twinges of emotion. Because you don't feel as "watched" as in a real life conversation, I think you can look even more closely. So it feels really intimate.
Because there is a break in the line of eyesight, you also can't be sure where they are looking. You can both be staring into the image of each other's eyes, but the line of sight doesn't line up, so you both feel the other person is looking down a little bit (assuming the cameras are mounted on top of the monitor).
I signed up for a class with a teacher who's basically a professional dancer / glamour/beauty girl, who is also proud of her contact with the world through italki (which I think is great;). she didn't have much experience and it was a bit tough to get through the first class, although she was nice. Second class: I asked if she knew what improv was (即兴) and she did! So I started a scene just trading off sentences... "I went into the office for the first day of a new job..." etc. and the story kept going and going for 45 minutes. I couldn't believe we kept it up that long, and it was really great. This is a further stage of learning a language - not just words + grammar but how to say things in various ways, and which ones were good - not proficient at all with it yet.
Every teacher has their own setup.
Once I took the subtitles for an entire 40 minutes Japanese tv show (Terrace House) and made them all into flashcards. My Japanese level is such that I'd only understand about 40% of what they're saying on this show normally. So I memorized all ~700 of those flash cards over a few days. These were full sentences - not just words, some colloquial things too.
Then I watched the show, and it was totally amazing. I could understand literally every single complex thing - it wasn't just vocab, but grammar that I wouldn't naturally get. It was a period of time when I kind of felt what it'd be like to have fluent hearing ability. But it was also like they just so happened to have chosen phrases and words I knew well; when the next episode came on, I suddenly couldn't understand anymore.
This is risky. With just one lesson, the teacher has a lot of doubt that you will stick to it, and won't prepare or commit very much. But jumping in with 5 is risky too. I generally would do 1, and if the teacher seemed nice and willing to talk about interesting things, I'd reserve 5 or 10 and keep going at the end of that if it was going well.
Within a few minutes - but booking very short lessons is weird so I'd usually go for 45. Speaking of which, 45 min lessons are much better than an hour; space them every hour so you have time to grab a bite, do a quick review, etc. I would only do 60 min lessons for teachers I really liked.
No, not really, and it doesn't matter much. You should take control of what you are doing in class and direct them; they're native so good ones can prepare summaries of issues you want to know about on the fly. For certain subjects, it helps to give warning though - For earlier lessons you will need to do reading and have lots of practice sentences set up; for listening classes (rare but worth doing at least once if not more) they need to prepare audio.
This is tough. But I got to really know some of my teachers and I felt like even at the end of a month, I had made massive progress. Confidence wise I went from completely unwilling to use it at work, to willing but not especially effective.
Absolutely loved it; made great progress, got to know 5 or so of my 20+ teachers pretty well, had many people know me very well, was a great way to spend early quarantine, total cost ~3.5k.