Teacher Discussion Forums

teaching's not teaching when you're teaching people you know, like friends or relatives. my husband's english is pretty bad and i have no
how to teach him, especially when i'm so impatient with him. anyone got any ideas/tips?

thanks.

dw

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Hello Mrs Impatient!
When I was struggling to learn German a couple of years ago we- my wife and I that is- decided that the only way to go was to speak only German with each other. It was very, very difficult at first- for the both of us. All the same, as the months passed, our need to communicate became the impetus for my acquisition of the German language. Nowadays speaking English to my wife (who is fully fluent in my mother tongue) sounds "weird" to my own ears! The only piece of advice I can offer you is "DON'T give up!". It'll take a lot of time, with probably many tears of frustration along the way; but if you stick at it ,you'll help your husband to get there in the end. There are no quick fixes though!

Good luck

It is really hard to teach anyone you know intimately anything, like children or a husband or parents. It is a different role to be a teacher but you can be supportive and find others who you know will suite your husband's personality to teach him if he really wants to learn. If he is an adult and doesn't speak well at this point, there might be a possibility that he doesn't really want to learn and wants you to learn his language instead.

Sally Olsen wrote:It is really hard to teach anyone you know intimately anything, like children or a husband or parents. It is a different role to be a teacher but you can be supportive and find others who you know will suite your husband's personality to teach him if he really wants to learn. If he is an adult and doesn't speak well at this point, there might be a possibility that he doesn't really want to learn and wants you to learn his language instead.

Good points above:

It's better to have a teacher teach him, and also be someone he isn't a friend or relative of.

Also, He may not be very motivated to learn English.

Does he look up words on his own? Does he listen to cassettes? Read grammar books? Attempt to start conversations with people in an effort to practice?

For a while I had a Chinese boyfriend (I'm from England) and we really enjoyed learning each others' languages. Every day we speak in English and Cantonese (although he's a lot better than I am) even though we're no longer dating, and watch movies together - in both languages. There are so many things you can do to learn each others languages that you can't necessarily do with a class of 80 students. Stop laughing at the back.

Sometimes we had difficulties and frustrations - he thought I was a dictionary and got annoyed when I couldn't quickly and accurately define a word. I thought he was stupid when he didn't understand my translations, but we just relaxed and realised that the friendship is more important than language. Sadly the relationship wasn't meant to be. We can still insult each other in both languages though!