[Accum. Hrs.] 2009.12

**Accumulating Period : 2009.12

Blog Update - About Taiwan

If you want to learn more about Taiwan history, life, travel and so on, please follow the links at the bottom of the homepage.

About Taiwan 台灣之美

[My Students] 009. Tim Badley's Comment

Peter can help you acheive your goals in Chinese in many ways.

1. He provides you handouts that explain grammatical rules.

2. He explains to you the current usage in Taiwanese daily conversation.
3. He also records for you useful sentences to review later.


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**Note by Peter:

Tim is really a proactive and enthusiastic learner. After finishing our trial teaching, he gave me some ideas on my teaching style (see the below article). I printed them out and put it in my teaching file in order to remind myself to notice it when I teach him every time. So I adapted my teaching style to meet his requests, this helped our classes go smoothly.

Private tutoring should be entirely student-oriented and tailor-made. In order to fulfill this, I follow students’ requests and endeavor to meet their needs.

In fact, I welcome all of my students to offer me any suggestions about how they want our teaching to go on. It shows that I care about my students' opinions, and the most important thing is that you are committed to your studies. Being a learner like this, there is no reason you cannot make great progress in your Chinese.

ATTITUDE DECIDES ALTITUDE.　態度決定高度。

Tim’s email is as follows: tim.badley@hotmail.com


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**Written by Tim:

Here are some of my notes from the last session.

1. Don't over teach me. I prefer quality over quantity.
    I want to create sentences rather than have too much vocabulary that I can't use.

2. Try to stick to the book. Even though Taiwanese may use different words,
    I'm trying to create sentences and dialog from the words used from my course.

3. You are doing well.
   
    For the class, I would like to try this format:
      1) Speak for 15 minutes in Chinese.
      2) Review homework.
      3) Go over grammar.
      4) Preview future lessons; go over March TOP
      5) Review lesson

[My Students] 005. Paul Modlinski's Comment

I've been meeting with Peter for two months now, trying to find out whether he could compete with Mandarin Training Center teachers at National Taiwan Normal University (which, by the way, is the most renowned one in Taiwan) and... I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.

Peter possesses all the qualities of a great teacher, and, not a bit less important, a friend. He has a deep knowledge of his language, and actually quite in-depth understanding for meanings and usage of words in Chinese (which most of my language exchange partners lack. To teach, one must know both the language and know about the language, Peter has both of those qualities). I've been studying linguistics for 3 years now, and I find Peter's way of explaining things really commendable, as it is both precise and covering a wide range of possible ways to use words and phrases he taught me.

What makes lessons with Peter something I find both worth looking forward and actually helping my Chinese, is the fact that Peter is one of the most driven teachers I've seen in years. Such a genuine passion for teaching and ability to go way out of his way to help his students is an extremely rare combination, a perfect one for a tutor.
On the whole, I really recommend having lessons with Peter, if you're serious about learning the language, he will help you a lot, whether you will only ask him questions or passively let him choose the topics for you. I've been in Taiwan for 6 months now, and I've met a lot of different teachers during my language exchange experience.

Peter definitely is the best so far. And, if you think this whole comment is biased, then simply try Peter out. As far as I know, he offers a number of trial lessons, to see if his style suits you. Take a few of these, and I'm sure that you will find Peter as a good a teacher as I have. That costs you nothing, so go for it.

I'm not Peter's alter ego writing him good reviews, if you still have any doubts, feel free to contact me on my e-mail:

Modlin@autograf.pl

Paul Modlinski

[My Students] 006. Todd McKenzie