To learn Spanish I need to teach English.

To learn Spanish I need to teach English.
 

Hi,

I live in Spain and I'm from England. I have recently met a girl online and her English skills are probably 2/10 and my Spanish skills are more or less 0. I haven't lived here long. I have also met her in person and she wants to learn more English, so I thought I'd try my best at teaching her English and she could teach me Spanish. We both would like to do it for 2 hours 3 times a week. Good deal huh!

Her mother has a couple of books relating to teaching Spanish and they are, "español en directo by Sanchez rios dominguez". (Anyone heard of them and are they any good?)

But my main concern is, if anyone may know, what is the best way for me to go about teaching her English. Even though I'm fluent, I'm not sure where to start and because she also knows a bit of English how determine where to carry on.

If anyone has any ideas on any books, ebooks or anything related to teaching English or has any experience with this, I'd sure appreciate it.

Thanks,

Andrew

It is very difficult teaching your own language because it does need special training. Probably you know what is correct, but very often you don't know why it is correct.

In your situation, I would try to arrange a system where you both teach yourselves, not each other. By this I mean that you meet either face to face or on skype. You have a text in Spanish and she has the same text in English. You read the Spanish and she reads the same in English. The real way you can help each other is to correct each other's pronunciation. You both study the texts in advance and work out what the text means.

If neither of you has the training, you will not be able to explain the grammar to each other. If you do not have a specific task to do, such as reading a text, you will be staring at each other not knowing what to say. Been there, done that.

But it can be great fun. Best of luck.

Why do they need to be explained about grammar?

So that the process takes a few years, not a few hundred years. :p

I mean basic concepts like conjugation of verbs and gender of nouns and adjectives. You have to be able to identify a word as a part of speech if you want to explain something.

It took me a year, as I have explained before, OK say two years tops.

Not 5, or 10 with all that grammar and then people still have problems talking... :tired:

Makes sense
 

Ok thanks. We'll just learn separately and when we get together just try to speak as much Spanglish as possible, then try to correct each other where we can.

Cheers for getting back to me.