Neftom

Thank you all for the feedback! I have now done German tutoring for about 10 weeks. I'm teaching 2 students, an American and a Briton. We're working towards the A1 level since they're both beginners with only basic knowledge of another foreign language. Every weekend I give them (separately) a private 90-120 minute lesson over VoIP (Skype/Mumble) and use Google Docs. On top of that I'm monitoring their Duolingo progress and answering any questions that may come up during the week. Duolingo is great for learning some vocabulary and basic sentence structure but it isn't amazing at teaching grammar, practical phrases, or pronunciation. That's what I've been focusing on. Texts are customized based on the students' interests. The test run has been a great success! But I agree it's not enough to be a native speaker. I have had to invest a lot of time in research as well as preparing the documents and exercises. Still I didn't want to waste their time so I worked at a from what I can tell minimal rate of 10€ per 60 minutes of lesson. It can't stay that low in the long run... Having a curriculum and regular schedule is very important. You should also never overwhelm your student - something we learned quite quickly - so it's fine to stop an ambitious lesson a bit early. I like having easy German Youtube videos ready for when that happens. Keep involving your students, ask them if they have questions and if they want to move on. Teaching dry grammar rules is necessary but it's best to do piecemeal. I have many more basic teaching principles to learn but I've enjoyed it so far!

First of all I've always believed in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity - in short, the language you think in necessarily influences what you think about, and the way you think. This can be because some words may not exist at all or are a lot less common. Gendered nouns affect it, too. Note this does not mean it is physically impossible for people of a certain language to learn a foreign concept. But it does mean it is much more difficult to think of and thus won't come up in casual discussions. Charlemagne once said "To have another language is to possess a second soul." so it's not even that new an idea! An English example is "nurse". Nurses are by definition of the word always female. You can be a "male nurse" but that implies you're an exception, and that the majority of nurses is expected to be female. That's actually borderline sexist! German used to have "Krankenschwester" (nurse) too. It literally means "sister of the sick", going back all the way to the nuns of religious orders. A male Krankenschwester can't exist. Krankenbruder, while technically correct, is an extremely uncommon and archaic word. That's why in 2004 a new law made it so the profession is called "Krankenpfleger": "carer of the sick". The gender matters a lot less (the word becomes a simple Krankenpflegerin if you insist on differentiating). I am a native German who speaks English fluently. I do notice myself seeing the world differently when I spend a long time thinking in only German or only English. Sometimes when I get stuck on a problem I've learned to switch my thinking language to try and see it from a slightly different perspective.

If you need professional translations manually done by people, I recommend Gengo. I'm still trying to apply as a translator there myself actually and let me tell you it's difficult to qualify! High standards. I haven't used it to get something translated, mind you, so I'm not sure how much it costs. For smaller projects, try the r/translator subreddit or sites like Freelancer maybe? Outside of manual translation sites like that I don't know of anything better than Google Translate unfortunately. It's the best we got so far. I've tried SDL FreeTranslation but it gave me the same (or worse) results.

I have made it a habit to listen to one TED talk a day (sometimes the most recent, sometimes an older one). Nice to have on my phone while exercising or cooking - few of them show graphics so I barely miss a thing. The majority are in English which I don't mind at all. That makes it sound like TED talks are mere background noise like any random podcast but no, I've found almost every single one I listened to fascinating. Educational. Makes me sit and think. It's still great to have translators doing the OTP because occasionally I really want to show my relatives or friends a presentation and not all of them are able to speak/understand fluent English. Being able to share talks this way is great! I'm curious... did your presentation cover something interesting that's not immediately obvious from the site?

Looks like a nice straightforward game! Torpedo in German is... Torpedo. It's actually the Latin name for electric ray fish. They paralyze people, I'm assuming like torpedoes paralyze and sink ships? As usual the important part is that it sounds cool. Anyway... IPA is necessary, I agree. Otherwise if I get a word that clearly looks Russian I don't have to worry about the meaning. It's too easy to recognize the language based on font or special characters. That increases the initial difficulty though. Embrace that and make the game about learning IPA as well! First you get easy words with IPA alongside them, later on you only see the spelling after you've guessed based on its pronunciation. You might want to also consider text-to-speech for lower difficulties (because TTS can still only handle simple words...)? What happens when you get one wrong? Do you only get 1 guess, or multiple? Is there a time limit for answers? Do I get a "results" screen at the end with a list of all the words I saw? In fact, how long is a play session? I like the idea a lot, and the art style of the mock-ups is great, that's why I want to make sure you don't end up skimping on gameplay design, sorry~

Took me half an hour to find... I first suspected Klingon, which wasn't it, but I knew for sure I had seen it before somewhere. Some popular alien font. It is called Aurebesh and comes from Star Wars. I "translated" (it is normal English in a weird font) one of the lines: I'm going to end up with a hellahandjob tomorrow if I keep this up That plus it being #dextroverse chat means he probably wanted to keep it secret for a reason so I won't dig further~

Recently an online friend of mine said he would like to learn German. He's a fan of the culture and figured I, as the only native German he knows, could teach him. Sure I am generally interested and care more about linguistics than most people I know, but... I can't do it for free as it takes time away from other paying hobbies. How much pay could I realistically ask for? More importantly, how difficult is it for me with no prior teaching experience? Should I even do this?

Couldn't help it! "Glück auf!" is a surprisingly common rural greeting here originating from old mining traditions. I am a 26-year-old non-professional from the Ore Mountains in Saxony, Germany. I speak fluent German and English. Since I spend most of my time on international sites like reddit - or playing online games - I've actually found myself using English more often than my native tongue. It's starting to suffer a bit! At school I was taught basic Latin but unfortunately dropped it as soon as I graduated. Didn't want to invest the time then, and simply cannot invest the time now. Helped me get interested in etymology at least. I tried qualifying for online translation jobs but failed twice so far. Not trying a third time before more practice. Glad I found linguaholic. Thanks for reading~