How to make best use of a tutor?

[shikang]

I am taking Chinese at a community college with a good teacher and our text book/listening materials are quite good. The problem is that most of the students in the class are learning extremely slow and the teacher has seemingly infinite patience. To give you an idea how slow we are learning; we just started the second semester and are on the fifth dialogue. Granted we only meet an hour and a half twice a week, but it seems no one is putting in time to study outside of class. All the in class time the teacher has to waste by drilling vocab and simple questions that thirty minutes a day of studying could completely fix.

I have pretty much decided I need to learn on my own. I am planning to go to China and want to learn as much as possible before I go. The school has a tutor hired who is in the library during scheduled hours. The thing is, she is mostly there so that people can ask her simple questions or get her to help if they are falling behind. I would kind of feel like a dick if I monopolized her so that I could do a bunch of extra stuff. She is in the library on SATURDAYS though, and I can only assume no one from our class is there and she's probably just sitting there bored for five hours. I'm planning on going in Saturdays and asking her if she can basically practice with me 1 on 1 and explain that I am trying to study in China and need to learn faster etc.

I tutor German and know how to teach a language (especially because I learned German as an American and know exactly what is hard for people to learn and also how to progress the students gradually etc.), but I have never been tutored. I have a feeling the tutor doesn't really know how to do what I will be asking her to, so I think I need some kind of idea in mind for what I should be doing with her. Our textbooks provide a dialogue for every chapter and some exercises for each dialogue. I generally memorize each dialogue in about a week or a week and a half, so I can recite all the dialogues from memory and am pretty comfortable with all the grammar and 100% on the vocab. The thing is, if you stray at all from what was in the dialogue I have had no practice and have to think about it and essentially make an educated guess. An example was the professor asked in class how to say "He doesn't eat lunch every day." I believe the correct answer was "他不是天天吃中飯" Because no grammatical formation (i.e. negating 天天) had been in any of the dialogues I had no idea you could negate it in that fashion, and because all our time in class is wasted drilling vocab I NEVER get to practice stuff like this. I don't think the tutor will know how to show me this kind of thing unless I specifically ask. The textbooks have only a few pages of exercises per chapter, and I have them all done no problem already.

Is there some kind of strategy anyone can think of for what I should do here? I really just want to practice conversational Mandarin with her and improve my prononciation/listening comprehension etc., but she is just a girl from Malaysia who is there to help for single questions. I am almost positive if I ask her something she will answer it and wait for the next question, she isn't going to say "Okay you should practice this, let me show you." if that makes any sense.

[leosmith]

I've used tutors quite a bit for Thai and Japanese, and will eventually use one for Mandarin (I'm just a beginner). For me, people from different cultures aren't very good at teaching me how to learn their language. I prefer to learn every aspect of the language on my own, except for conversation.

I'm going through pimsleur right now. When I finish, I'll hire a tutor for conversation. The simple rule for the tutor will be: if you can understand me, don't correct me. So my grammar will suck. But I'll write down each word she says, and learn them before the next session. This will quickly make me conversational.

The next thing to do is systematically work my way through a text book series. During this stage, I'll probably use the tutor once or less per week. I'll use the tutor again beginning about a month before a vacation I'll take in China.

That pretty much covers how I use tutors. For conversation, they can't be beat.

[Guest dmrt_]

I use a grammar book with a lot learning material inside each chapter and take private "lessons" with someone who is not a pro at teaching Chinese. Because the chapters

have a text, new vocabulary, a grammar and a usage section, and an exercise section, we follow this pattern: I learn vocabulary and read the text at home, in class I read the text sentence by sentence after my tutor. With each word from the vocabulary list I make 2 or three my own sentences, she immediately finds out/corrects if I understood some word wrong. In the usage section there are new usage patterns, so she explains them to me in Chinese and then makes a couple of examples of her own. After that I also build 2-3 sentences. I do all the exercises at home and in class just read them loud, if I made mistakes she corrects them, I build some sentences with the word or pattern I had wrong. At some point we discuss the text - she asks question, I answer. I think all this stuff is not new, you would find similar teaching techniques in foreign language classes. The only thing is that you teach the other person how to teach. I am not sure how eager is your tutor to actually teach following some program ? But if she does, you might need to get some good text book and plan your own class.

Hope it helps a bit.

[flameproof]

1. Most tutors are making use of you, or more precise, your money.

2. Most tutors have no idea about how to teach, or what to teach.

3. Most tutors, at best, they can copy something from a book.

4. Most tutors from China will teach the same boring way they learned, or not learned.

With that in mind, it's best to have YOUR OWN method, and have that applied by the "teacher". So you need to think what you want to learn and they way you want to learn it. That way it works better.

Classrooms are a bit special. Usually students will ask completely irrelevant questions, and the teacher will try its best to give a long answer. At that point more irrelevant may come up.

Specially when it come to grammar (which is not important for beginners anyway) the "WHY" is just a waste of time. That's the way it is. Take it or leave it. Period. Language is no math with clear rules.

To give an example, I asked: what's the difference between 作 + 做

It's a completely irrelevant question for a beginner. Firstly, in spoken language (that's what I focus on) it's the same. And in written language many Chinese get it wrong too.

shikang, you were a tutor before. If you are a good one you will know how you want to be trained.