Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2245 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I dislike about language group classes is that you learn with other non-native speakers (and, in general, with the same experiences that you have).

In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.

I definitely think it's important that you teach your native language/that you learn from a native speaker. Learning Japanese from a novice is not something that I want to do.

View on HN

> One thing I dislike about language group classes is that you learn with other non-native speakers (and, in general, with the same experiences that you have).

> In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.

I absolutely second this as someone who has taken 3/5 semesters of Chinese. Some classmate's pronounciation is so objectively wrong that I have to pay attention for when they're called on just to mute my volume output. Obviously I can't do this in-person.

I've taken one-on-one courses in another language and it's (believable I suppose) how much faster I've progressed.

Another fault is that some classes are structured so that nobody fails or falls behind (whether they're night classes, at a school, or in a corporate environment). The fault with that is that many other subjects simply don't care if 1/3 of the class fails, but language group classes tend to go at the speed of the lowest individuals.

These classes I was referring to were often taught by a native speaker, so there was always at least one person in any class worth emulating. But that was never really my issue so I am not a good judge of how others experience that problem.

Moving backward a few years, my high school teacher (singular) was a bit odd. He sat us in the same alphabetical pattern every year. Behind me sat a girl with impeccable vocabulary but some of the worst pronunciation in the whole class. Meanwhile I had impeccable pronunciation and a respectable vocabulary.

By senior year she had still not improved, and some days it was more than I could take. It was only a few years ago that I realized that while she couldn’t see me make faces, the teacher could. And so he had to stand up front interacting with her while I was in his field of vision, trying and failing not to make pained facial expressions. I don’t know if he found that frustrating, amusing, or something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com