I just finished a pretty good Spanish lesson on Italki with a professional teacher that had some structure. During the lesson he asked me point blank “What made you choose me as your teacher?” It made me a little uncomfortable because I didn’t want to say I picked 5 teachers at random and did a lesson with each but that’s the frank truth.
During one trial lesson as a teacher I was teaching, the student volunteered that she picked me because of my personality in the intro video. I thought this was kind of a funny reason.
What about you all? As teachers do you ask this question as part of a retention strategy? How has it worked? What kind of answers do you get and how do you use the information?
As students what stands out most about a teachers profile that makes you pick them for the first lesson?
I have a suggestion if you are intermediate or advanced and are not sure of what to study next: learn the IPA symbols of some of those words and compare to other words you pronounce well.
One example my students always have a problem with is the word "Said" such as "I said that I was hungry"
Student pronunciation: sounds like "Aid" which is not consistent with American or British pronunciation.
I taught these students the IPA symbol ɛ and that its the same sound in "Bed" and "led" written in IPA as sɛd. Now these students never make this mistake and know how to use the IPA symbol to validate how to pronounce "dead" "lead" etc and how not to pronounce "extremely" (no ɛ) or "pretty" (no ɛ).
Any other such experiences?
I would love to hear everyone's ideas for "reigniting their passion" (making themselves interested again) in learning!
-Learn Grammar?
-Networking?
How do you all use Italki? What do you think are the most effective methods of using Italki to learn a language?
Hello everyone,
For the intermediate and advanced learners of English here, I am curious as to what is seen as one of the most difficult but interesting aspects of the English language?
In German there is a podcast course I listen to that focuses solely on prefix verbs, since they are a difficult but interesting and important part of that language.
If some italki teacher were to perhaps develop an "Advanced Focus" course for italki students, what would you like to see it on? Phrasal verbs? The different conditional sentence types (real vs hypothetical vs impossible)? Colloquial expressions that aren't just clichés but integral parts of daily speech?
