Hi Everyone,
I am posting here because i am at a loss as to how i can help improve my girlfriends english, she is Chinese and has been studying english for quite some time (pretty much her entire school life). She does have an excellent grasp of the language however there are quite a few things i have picked up on.
She has an excellent vocabulary obtained by spending hours reading a dictionary
so i've never thought this was an issue for her.
Her reading/listening skills appear to be quite good. Most of the time she can keep up with me even if i am speaking at natural speed. However i feel she often misunderstands the meaning of the entire sentence or phrase etc.., its almost as if she looks at the sentence picks out keywords and then assumes the rest. She also seems to have trouble with understanding my expression ( not sure how to describe this sorry), ie hard for her to know if what i've said is in a joking context, angry, upset, happy etc.. any emotion put into what i say seems to get lost in translation and leads to really big misunderstandings. An example of this is when we may have been talking for a while (30 minutes or so) and i begin to get the impression she misunderstood something i initially said, when i ask her i quickly discover she did indeed misunderstand what i said at first and we have since been having a really confusing conversation.
Her writing skills are average but im not sure if this is just because she is a bit lazy/relaxed when shes talking to me. She tends to use really simple sentences and basic grammar and whenever she attempts slightly larger sentences they seem to get a bit messed up with things like wrong word order, wrong word (things like do/does etc..), sometimes the sentences are correct but not at all natural and it's really hard for me to explain to her why she shouldnt even use that particular sentence. so from what i can tell she really needs a lot of work on her own written/spoken grammar and sentence patterns.
Her spoken english is getting pretty good, she has some issues like running out of breath when she speaks or fully announcing each word as if it is its own sentence rather than fluently speaking the sentence with links between words to round out the sound. This part im not overly worried about as i think it will just require me and her to spend more time constantly speaking.
So basically her biggest problem is using really simple grammar, wrong (but correct) unnatural sounding sentences, incorrect use of words, tense seems to cause some issues too.
Anyway i am in no way shape or form a Teacher. I have tried many ways to help her but most of the time i fail because i have absolutely no idea what i am doing. I think i put her off wanting to learn because im using bad methods to try and help eg: over correction, boring her by making her repeat herself. Couple that with myself not being the most patient "Tutor" in the world and it's easy to understand why she might lose her motivation :S. The list goes on but i'd rather not fill up an entire page.
So what i'm after is some advice from a few teachers and maybe other students on what the best approach would be for me to assist her in improving her english. Currently we don't get a lot of time to chat (about 1- 2 hours every night and longer on the weekends), she works a fair bit so is often tired and uninterested in studying. I was hoping maybe there are some methods that can be used subtly or a method that will appeal to her and make the whole process seem fun. I think these issues need to be addressed now because it seems we are developing some bad lazy habits and i really want to break us both out of this.
If you need more info let me know, I really appreciate any help offered.
Cheers
I am posting here because i am at a loss as to how i can help improve my girlfriends english, she is Chinese and has been studying english for quite some time (pretty much her entire school life). She does have an excellent grasp of the language however there are quite a few things i have picked up on.
She has an excellent vocabulary obtained by spending hours reading a dictionary
so i've never thought this was an issue for her. Her reading/listening skills appear to be quite good. Most of the time she can keep up with me even if i am speaking at natural speed. However i feel she often misunderstands the meaning of the entire sentence or phrase etc.., its almost as if she looks at the sentence picks out keywords and then assumes the rest. She also seems to have trouble with understanding my expression ( not sure how to describe this sorry), ie hard for her to know if what i've said is in a joking context, angry, upset, happy etc.. any emotion put into what i say seems to get lost in translation and leads to really big misunderstandings. An example of this is when we may have been talking for a while (30 minutes or so) and i begin to get the impression she misunderstood something i initially said, when i ask her i quickly discover she did indeed misunderstand what i said at first and we have since been having a really confusing conversation.
Her writing skills are average but im not sure if this is just because she is a bit lazy/relaxed when shes talking to me. She tends to use really simple sentences and basic grammar and whenever she attempts slightly larger sentences they seem to get a bit messed up with things like wrong word order, wrong word (things like do/does etc..), sometimes the sentences are correct but not at all natural and it's really hard for me to explain to her why she shouldnt even use that particular sentence. so from what i can tell she really needs a lot of work on her own written/spoken grammar and sentence patterns.
Her spoken english is getting pretty good, she has some issues like running out of breath when she speaks or fully announcing each word as if it is its own sentence rather than fluently speaking the sentence with links between words to round out the sound. This part im not overly worried about as i think it will just require me and her to spend more time constantly speaking.
So basically her biggest problem is using really simple grammar, wrong (but correct) unnatural sounding sentences, incorrect use of words, tense seems to cause some issues too.
Anyway i am in no way shape or form a Teacher. I have tried many ways to help her but most of the time i fail because i have absolutely no idea what i am doing. I think i put her off wanting to learn because im using bad methods to try and help eg: over correction, boring her by making her repeat herself. Couple that with myself not being the most patient "Tutor" in the world and it's easy to understand why she might lose her motivation :S. The list goes on but i'd rather not fill up an entire page
.So what i'm after is some advice from a few teachers and maybe other students on what the best approach would be for me to assist her in improving her english. Currently we don't get a lot of time to chat (about 1- 2 hours every night and longer on the weekends), she works a fair bit so is often tired and uninterested in studying. I was hoping maybe there are some methods that can be used subtly or a method that will appeal to her and make the whole process seem fun. I think these issues need to be addressed now because it seems we are developing some bad lazy habits and i really want to break us both out of this.
If you need more info let me know, I really appreciate any help offered.
Cheers
