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โพสต์
Can you see the number of trial lessons taught? We used to be able to see this important statistic on visiting a potential teacher’s profile.
Context: In addition to teaching here, I’m also taking lessons as a student (in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hebrew), and one of the first things I look at on a teacher’s profile is the number of trial lessons they’ve taught — ideally, the number of trials will be low in proportion to the total number of lessons.
Feel free to share your opinions and observations as a comment.
Can you see the number of *trial* lessons taught?
No, I cannot see the number of trial lessons.
33%
Yes, I can see them clearly.
67%
โหวต 3 คน • ปิดโพล
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*Followers*
Do we no longer get notifications when someone follows us in the Community? We used to get notifications, and there was a way we could see who was following us, so that we could follow them back.
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Improve YOUR English pronunciation for free: Syllables in English pronunciation:
The following is about syllables in English phonology (not orthography).
First of all, syllables and words are never separated in speech — everything is connected smoothly. *Connecting the last consonant of one word or syllable to the first vowel of the next word or syllable will usually make English much easier for you to pronounce*, and will also sound more native.
As far as rhythm, syllabification does make a subtle difference, and it may help to know the difference between tense vowels (including diphthongs) and lax vowels.
Example words with tense vowels:
Fee, day, spa*, paw, go, goo, by, boy
feet, fate, caught*, goat, boot, light, voice
Example words with lax vowels:
fit, pet, pat, cot*, cut, put
*Note “spa” and “cot” have the same vowel sound in Canadian and most American accents. “Caught” is pronounced with the same vowel as “cot” in Canadian and some American accents.
Tense vowels and diphthongs can end a syllable, in which case the syllable is “open”. Lax vowels must always be followed by a consonant in the syllable, in which case the syllable is “closed”. So in words like “having” or “giving”, the /v/ is the end of the first syllable, not the beginning of the second. This affects the rhythm, but the /v/ will still connect to the following syllable — do not separate them with a pause or glottal stop or anything. The consonant will also connect across a word boundary, for example, “have it” is usually pronounced as if it were one word, with the /v/ connecting with the vowel in “it”.
The most frequent vowel of all is the reduced vowel (“schwa”), found only in unstressed syllables (both open and closed). This is a neutral vowel analogous to the neutral tone of Mandarin (輕聲), but much more common in English.
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Share with us YOUR experience with language PARTNERS
What can you teach us from your experience with language exchange? What activities did you do? Did it become a real friendship, or was it just about getting free language practice? Was it effective for language learning (or cultural exchange, or something else)? Were there any problems that you’d like to caution other learners about? Was there anything really effective that you’d like to recommend? In your opinion, what is the ideal language partnership like?
NOTE: I’m not personally looking for a language partner. While I mostly study on my own, I’m thankful to have several outstanding italki tutors helping me out. This post is to help language learners on italki share their hard-won wisdom with each other so they can excel in their language learning.
If you’d like corrections to your comments on this thread, you must specifically request it in your comment, otherwise it is assumed you would prefer not to receive corrections.
Eagerly awaiting YOUR opinion!
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Native English speakers: Do you ever say “And you?”?
When someone asks you how you are, do you answer and say “<em>And you?</em>”? Personally, I’ve always heard “<em>What about you(rself)?</em>” or “<em>How about you(rself?</em>” from native English speakers. For a short version, you’ll often hear a simple “<em>yourself?</em>”, but I can’t remember ever hearing a native speaker say “<em>And you?”</em>, and I’ve never seen it in any reliable ESL textbook.
What about you, do native speakers ever say "<em>And you?</em>"?
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What’s YOUR business learning English? :)
English is the current international language of choice around the world, so it’s no surprise that most of my ESL students are learning it for business purposes (among others). But the thing is, everyone’s business is different. Long ago, before starting to teach English, if you had said “business”, I’d have thought of managing a big company. But what level of management? What kind of company? How large a company? Even in the same company, there’s a huge difference between production, marketing, finance, human resources, etc.
And when you think about it, isn’t everyone involved in business of some type? I mean, unless you’re independently wealthy — but even then, it must get boring sitting around all day eating caviar and sipping champagne. In reality, isn’t business just life? There’s the farmer looking for ways to supply food to foreign markets, the internet marketer, the large company that everyone’s heard about, the small startup that no one's heard about, the consulting firm (what kind of consulting?) high tech, low tech, banking and finance, mom ’n’ pop stores, the list could go on forever. And if every size, shape, and kind of business has its own peculiarities, why do English teachers love to talk about “business” English so much? Is there really one “business” English, and is business really separate from non-business activities — in terms of language?
So here are some more questions for you to share your experience: Do you consider yourself to be in the “business world”? What’s your business? What does the word “business” mean to you? What specifically do you expect to get out of it?
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大家好。你喜歡對聯嗎？
你喜歡對聯嗎？你最喜歡的對聯是哪首，對你來說，這首是什麼意義？
感謝你的分享！
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『吧』這個字在這個句子裡有什麼意思？
A: 你每天什麼時候睡覺？
B: 九點多吧，很早。我早上起床也很早。
大家好，『吧』這個字在這個句子裡有什麼意思？可以省略嗎？謝謝大家！（為我糟糕的中文道歉。）
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Pt, Fr, Ar, En, Ch: Do YOU know what on earth this is about?
On this forum, we occasionally see language-partner requests using these supposed abbreviations. (They seem to think Ch is “China”, but I’m pretty sure it’s really Switzerland. “China” is Zh, isn’t it?) If someone can’t even take the time to write out the name of your language in full, just how motivated are they to study and learn a language?
How do you feel about these abbreviations? Do you use them yourself? In what context?
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Is ENGLISH the ONLY language in the forum???
Volt Age has an interesting discussion on the use of random languages in the English forum. In fact, the problem is quite the opposite. (For the record, I gave Volty a thumbs-up for raising an interesting topic, although, as a lover of comparative linguistics, I completely disagree with his post.) Volty's discussion:
<a href="https://www.italki.com/discussion/239209" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 71, 178); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Comparing Languages</a>
My take on this:
Right now, looking at the front page of the unsorted forum, we see that 14 out of 20 discussions are classified as English. There are two in Spanish, and one each in Japanese, Maghrebi Arabic, Italian, and French. But wait —of the six discussions that are not in the English forum, only two of them are actually written in a language other than English. The Maghrebi "discussion" (actually a language partner request) is titled in French, and the (extremely short) post is written in Maghrebi (presumably), using the so-called “franco-arabic” romanization scheme (used for texting before the invention of the smartphone). The only other “discussion” not in English is one of the two in the Spanish forum (again, it is merely a language partner request). So the fact is that finding a non-English discussion is exceedingly difficult. Let's be honest: If you want to reach the largest audience (as many posters do), you write in English. So the hard part is finding good discussions on comparative linguistics or on (or even "in") languages (even the popular ones) other than English.
Suggestion: Shouldn’t there be a new filter for the discussion section — say, “every language except English”?
Edit: I originally wrote “of the six discussions that are not in the English forum, only four of them are actually written in a language other than English”. I should have written “of the six discussions that are not in the English forum, only two of them are actually written in a language other than English”. The other four were in fact written in English. So, yes, out of 20 discussions on the top page, 18 were written in English.
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