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Linguaholic

Helping others: we're not all teachers


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It's an issue I often get on and where I don't know much about what I can do, leading me to more improvisation: how to help others learning a language when yourself you're not a teacher?
Take an example. I know English & French. I speak them both. I meet an English speaker who wants to learn French. How can I help this person to learn French efficiently? I don't especially have resources, I don't have strategies in mind. Sure, I know how to write French sentences (luckily!), but about communicating that to someone else, that's another affair that suddenly becomes more challenging.
I think anyway we already defy this challenge with every single post in this forum, anyway.

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I made a post about a weird teaching method I thought of. Basically, divide the learning process into stages. You start at the basic stage where you know nothing. Therefor, you can bring him baby books and just translate them to him, make him read the sentences even if he doesn't understand, and soon enough he will learn. Afterwards, you can give him slightly harder books and ask him to write about various topics which you can come up with. He's allowed to use a dictionary and therefor, you're really just pointing him towards his goal, he's really doing the work. 

Don't give up on teaching him, because not only will it help him, it will help you as well. By teaching others, you further your understanding of the language and you will find the answers to questions you might of previously had about the question in hand.

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I made a post about a weird teaching method I thought of. Basically, divide the learning process into stages. You start at the basic stage where you know nothing. Therefor, you can bring him baby books and just translate them to him, make him read the sentences even if he doesn't understand, and soon enough he will learn. Afterwards, you can give him slightly harder books and ask him to write about various topics which you can come up with. He's allowed to use a dictionary and therefor, you're really just pointing him towards his goal, he's really doing the work. 

Don't give up on teaching him, because not only will it help him, it will help you as well. By teaching others, you further your understanding of the language and you will find the answers to questions you might of previously had about the question in hand.

I often find that learning once again dark parts is a good thing so you're right, it could help myself for my language but also for my teaching skills. The little problem is how to catch attention of the person you try to teach with a baby book. Okay, it feels more obvious to identify a cat and do the translation than when it's a baby, because you can't communicate a lot to the baby to be sure he understood or not, but at the same time, this attention affair may be important as well.

Otherwise, it's a bit weird, yes but I find it interesting.

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I personally like the idea of the baby books, and then graduating up from there.  One should always start with basics, either colors or names of objects.  Think of it as how you would teach a child.

After that, I would help them with figuring out the masculine and feminine words.  I love using Duolingo, but that is my personal preference.

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I personally like the idea of the baby books, and then graduating up from there.  One should always start with basics, either colors or names of objects.  Think of it as how you would teach a child.

After that, I would help them with figuring out the masculine and feminine words.  I love using Duolingo, but that is my personal preference.

As said, the problem is catching attention with that. You have more likeliness to catch attention with a domain or something interesting the person (and in the end, it means it is more likely that the person will learn the language and continue to keep up the work), than with babies book. I like the idea as you, but when I try to test it a bit in mind, this is the first concern coming around.

After all, how many times in life you want to talk about colors? Are we sure that's the first sentence we want to learn? There's perhaps something more practical to know.

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