Farang To Teach Thai

[meadish_sweetball]

I had two non-native and one native Thai speaker teach me Thai during my first two years of study. All of these three people were good teachers who provided insight into different aspects of the language.

IMO, just the fact that somebody is native or non-native is not enough to determine whether they will be suitable teachers for you or not.

[Rikker]

IMO, just the fact that somebody is native or non-native is not enough to determine whether they will be suitable teachers for you or not.

Agreed. Native English speakers frequently make crap English teachers, and of course the same is true anywhere. Teaching is a talent and a skill, but not something any old person can do. To discount non-natives entirely is misguided, I'd say, because of the "been there, done that, let me tell you how" aspect.

It all depends on many factors, like where in the learning process someone is, availability of native speakers, language difficulty, student discipline, and what they actually want to even get out of it.

Regular (and preferably constant) interaction with natives is 1000% necessary, though. But interacting and taking lessons are different things.

[timinchina]

Of course not everyone wants to get to the level of a native speaker. They do presumably want to get as close as they can though, with the time and effort they are willing to put in. My worry, if I were a beginner, would be picking up bad pronunciation from a non-native. To try and emulate somebody's imperfect pronuncaition is only going to put you even further away from the correct pronunciation than they are.

Yes. the truth is that it is harder to unlearn something than it is to learn it in the first place. I remember during the 90's a lot of my friends went to work on German building sites. They picked up German from the other non-native speaker migrant workers. Later when they wanted to learn to speak proper German they found it almost impossible to get rid of their previous bad speaking habits.

Was one of them Jimmy Nail?