My Girlfriend needs Chinese websites to learn English..

[mdude]

Hello! My girlfriend is in the process of learning English. She doesn't know any English at all so she is just a beginner.

I asked my chinese friend and she recommended me this site: http://www.hjenglish.com/

She doesnt have the money to go to school. So she has to learn after work at home.

Does anyone know any other chinese websites that could be helpful for her.

I have been using chinese pod to learn chinese. I think it is extremely helpful. So maybe something like that to help her..

Any recommendations?

[Pearl River]

I gather your girlfriend is also in Canada, like you? Assuming that you live in a city or town, are there any part-time or evening ESL (English as a Second Language) classes near where you live? In London, for example, there are lots of colleges offering free ESL classes to immigrants. I note you're specifically interested in websites, but I would've thought, given that your girlfriend is a beginner, it'd be better for her to have face to face interaction with a tutor. As for websites, I'd recommend:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories/

This might seem a bit childish at first glance , but I know of a lot of new immigrants watching Cbeebies programmes to improve their English.

[mdude]

No unfortunately she does not live in Canada. She lives in China，or my work would pay for her school.

The websites are good for someone wanting to improve their english, but she doesnt know any english at all. So it would not help her, and the

website is english so she would not know how to read it.

[renzhe]

It is extremely difficult to learn a foreign language on your own if you have never learned a foreign language before. Some sort of course will be by far your best option. IMHO, even for experienced learners, podcasts and web tools make for good additional resources, but are not enough on their own.

On the positive side, I've encountered a story where two people met online and in the beginning, the daughter of one of them had to translate the messages back and forth between them. I met them a few times, and the lady could speak passable German. However, she did learn German in Germany, after moving over, so it's not an easy thing.

[cababunga]

Just came across this http://www.yangyangcheng.com/?u=englishteaching

Educational videos based on episodes of Friends and Sex and the City.

[valikor]

OP says classes are not an option. If this is TRULY the case, then some of the previous suggestions are unworkable.

I'd guess any textbook would be okay; one of the most popular ones seems to be New Concept English (新概念英语). I don't have any experience with it, but I've read a few lessons here and there, and it seemed fine.

Personally I don't see why the class would be necessary, and would say that motivation and structure are probably more important. (Classes being good, in my estimation, because they provide lots of structure) So, if she had, for example, a boyfriend who is a native speaker of English and is going to help her practice (especially in a structured manner, like a couple times a week for a couple hours), then I think she could make steady progress.

(The idea of having set times to practice or review exercises--and being strict about it--seems important to me. Otherwise, she might end up like me in my Spanish study. I've been "studying" it for several months now, and have just recently made it to lesson 8 of the textbook I'm using. And I have skipped the majority of the exercises :-P )

Good luck.

[InternetWarrior67]

I'm also looking for information like this for independent Chinese language students.

 

I'm not sure what kind of offline dictionary app to recommend to the students. I've learned several languages but never used flashcards to practice vocabulary, but after using flashcards to learn Chinese the method seems so good that I have to consider whether I would've been better served using flashcard software in other languages too.

 

So is there an offline dictionary app or flashcard service that Chinese learners can use with their phones? You know how Chinese girls and phones can be. It would be a really convenient way for them to learn at all times of the day, as it is for me.

[James3]

I live in the U.S. and have not been to China yet, but I've met several language exchange partners on-line. And many of them have told me of their having to learn English at a very young age in class, and they all studied it for several years. Up to this point, therefore, I guess I assumed it was mandatory for any child in China to learn English.

 

But for the OP to say that his girlfriend from China doesn't know any English tells me my assumption was wrong. Maybe it depends on the province they're in, or on the school they're in. Anyone know?

[hedwards]

Starting from absolute zero is rather tough. I've been volunteering in a classroom where the students are early beginners and that's just tough. We're talking about students that are still learning the basics of sounding words out and doing simple spelling and dictation tests for things like cat, dog and Bud are tripping folks up.

 

Probably the best thing would be for you to get a picture dictionary or use a search engine and google translate (or whatever non-Google equivalent is out there) to pick up vocabulary. Then give her a couple of sentence blanks to work with, along with some example. For example (Subject-copular be-complement)The ____ is ____. Can become The sun is hot. The cat is black. The car is fast. And so forth. You'd be surprised how much you can express knowing just three basic sentence types. The other two involve transitive and intransitive verbs.

 

It's a good approach in that it will work and she will start producing grammatical sentences quite quickly. It's a shoestring approach, but it's reliable.