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There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of what works for some individuals. However, pointing out the common problems, shared by everybody, is also informative.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of what works for some individuals. However, pointing out the common problems, shared by everybody, is also informative. Here are some: * The factors in learning a new language are age (adolescence is a threshold), innate skill, motivation (and guilt), effort and similarity of the languages. * Sounds are not listener-independent: your Chinese friend does not hear the same sounds as you do, so don't expect that they know which sounds you are correcting in their English when you repeat the word for the tenth time. Same the other way around. I have seen this leading again, again and again to absurd "are you deaf?" situations between otherwise attentive friends and teachers. * It might be helpful to discuss metalanguage: direct objects, word order, verb transitivity, nouns vs verbs, parsing, etc. This is something you learn in school in France, Spain, Germany, some Arab countries, etc, and if you studied Latin. But if you went through a standard English-speaking school system you might want to catch up with that.

rtpg 13y ago
>don't expect that they know which sounds you are correcting in their English when you repeat the word for the tenth time. This phenomenon is probably the most interesting thing I've found out in my life. The fact that some people simply cannot hear certain sounds goes against everything we would like to think. When people talk about varying tone inside words (such as in Chinese or Thai), while I obviously hear that something is happening, I cannot for the life of me reproduce what I hear or even retain the tonal information. For me , tone is a separate aspect to vocabulary and I can't assimilate the two. Inversely, seeing the plight of poor Japanese people, who get taught English from an early age through the limited japanese syllable system (not sure the exact name), unable to repeat words properly, and sometimes going completely off the mark. This just accents the need for everyone to be exposed to as many languages as possible as a child.

rtpg 13y ago

>don't expect that they know which sounds you are correcting in their English when you repeat the word for the tenth time. This phenomenon is probably the most interesting thing I've found out in my life. The fact that some people simply cannot hear certain sounds goes against everything we would like to think. When people talk about varying tone inside words (such as in Chinese or Thai), while I obviously hear that something is happening, I cannot for the life of me reproduce what I hear or even retain the tonal information. For me , tone is a separate aspect to vocabulary and I can't assimilate the two. Inversely, seeing the plight of poor Japanese people, who get taught English from an early age through the limited japanese syllable system (not sure the exact name), unable to repeat words properly, and sometimes going completely off the mark. This just accents the need for everyone to be exposed to as many languages as possible as a child.