Designing a Language Course For Yourself
One of the main reasons I’m even living in China is to improve my Chinese. While I speak more fluently than I did a few months ago, and some of the rust has come off, I find that I’m really not improving much, and it’s time to take things a bit more seriously.
That left me with three options. I could step up my studying on my own time, enroll in a school program, or find a tutor. I’ve already proven myself to be fairly lazy, and my work schedule makes attending any kind of school more or less impossible. Chinese tutors, though, are plentiful and inexpensive, so that’s the road I’ll be taking.
The problem with that is that unless you get really lucky and find a great one, you still need to more or less design your own course of study. Choosing a textbook is at least partially your decision, as is exactly what you study and how the tutoring sessions work. That affords a lot of customization, but it does mean you have to be extra careful you’re not wasting your time, too.
The first step, as I see it, is choosing a textbook. It’s tough to know exactly what fits with your level; I’m making my judgement based primarily on vocabulary. But even then, you need to figure out how the sessions will run. Will you read the textbook aloud? Practice the vocab/grammar? Prepare the text beforehand and then discuss it together/get quizzed on it by the tutor? It depends on your goals, I guess, my hope is to improve my active vocabulary (i.e., the vocabulary I know well enough to use myself when speaking) significantly, so I’m planning to prepare each lesson beforehand, and spend the tutoring session discussing questions I have with the grammar, being quizzed on the content, and discussing related issues more freely to practice my speaking and listening.
Once a week, I plan to dedicate a tutoring session to pure pronunciation for the first half, and pure conversation for the second half. I’ll read from simple texts and have my tutor correct any pronunciation mistakes; then we’ll discuss whatever topic I’ve prepared for the day and he will help me express anything I’m not sure how to say.
My current plan is to have about 4 hours/week, which will cost me 100RMB/week. I’m hoping the expense will keep me on the ball enough to actually work outside of the tutoring sessions. My school also offers two hours of free lessons every week, which I’ll probably dedicate to more relaxed, informal study. I’ve got a textbook here called Chinese Idiomatic Phrases for Foreign Students, I think I may do some lessons from that or just discuss whatever’s in the news recently.