Marah wrote:Has anyone here experience with giving private language lessons?
Yes, although not a very successful experience, and this was about a dozen years ago, so forgive me for my hazy memory of it.
This was what led me to eventually start a website.
If so, how did you go about it?
When I was in middle school (7th grade), one of the neighboring kids made friends with me and sat with me on the bus to school. I don't remember how I ended up teaching him Malayalam, though. I think he was just intrigued when I started telling him once about my heritage language and asked me to teach him a bit of it. He had his own website on geocities and convinced me or at least inspired me to start my own for teaching Malayalam.
Anyway, as I recall, I started out by teaching him the alphabet, bit by bit (and in order), and (eventually, once I started getting into developing my website at least) letting him quiz himself over more and more of the alphabet using a technique I borrowed from India's
Learn [language name] in 30 Days series: showing him a bunch of letters in some arbitrary order and getting him to identify each letter. I also gave him a few links so he could teach himself how to write the letters (although I never actually gave him a writing quiz FWIR
). At one point, I showed him a kind of short reference manual all in Malayalam intended for schoolchildren so he could see the letters being used in actual words, and I taught him a few really random words from there (one of them was 'stork'). He was a really good and eager student, but unfortunately, our lessons were cut short within a few years, because I was one grade ahead of him. High school students don't ride the same bus as middle school students, and I almost never got to see him again.