If I had an alternative I found to be better, I would love to provide it and point out why it’s better. I just don’t have one. I’m not interested in arguing about who’s book is better so I intentionally dont join those conversations. OP just seemed to be worried about the viability of the resource due to certain complaints and I just made it clear that I don’t find those complaints to amount to
much.
I literally provided an opinion based off of my own experience lmao. You just don’t like it.
That’s where I was coming from. I never actually looked for alternatives since I had already moved past it, and that’s where I think we can explore what’s out there right now.
But I can understand that there are merits on both sides, so I’m not trying to change your mind. I’m just sharing my experience.
I’m not even claiming there is a merit to using tae kim tho, just that it’s viable. If you go back, me and crihak were just responding to the concern that the kims guide wasn’t a serious one. We were talking about viability, not superiority. Two very different things.
At the end of the day, I imagine there is a better guide than tae kim out there. Personally, I don’t know of it and I don’t really don’t care to look for it. As a result, I can’t say tae kims the best but only that it works.
I’m literally living proof that it’s viable. I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with.
No problem. To make it clear to anyone else in case my posts were confusing, tae Kims guide is on the older side and a lot of people who are really good at japanese now have used it. I do think that this can be misleading some people to think it’s better, but really only take it as meaning it’s viable. Again I don’t have any alternatives personally, but I’m sure there’s plenty of good stuff out there.
Absolutely, 100%, for sure. As long as you are proficient in the language you want to teach, your first language doesn’t really matter.
Most people who learn English as their second language don’t learn it from people who speak it as their first language, not entirely anyway. Roughly 379 million people speak English as their first language, yet estimates for the number of total English speakers go up to 2 billion. And of course, not every native speaker is an ESL teacher. Only an estimated 250,000 are. That would mean each ESL teacher is responsible for teaching 8000 people how to speak English. ESL speakers simply cannot all be learning from a native English speaker - there aren’t enough of us to go around!
Of course this is kinda comparing ringos and orenjis. There are about 125 million first language speakers of Japanese to 1 million second language users. And most Japanese speakers live in Japan (90% of 'em). But my point is that learning a language from a native speaker isn’t always possible, yet people manage to learn languages all the time.
I was 26, maybe 27 years old when I learned what a gerund was. I’d just assumed that anything ending in -ing was a verb in some sort of progressive tense. Big nope.
I can’t find the numbers I want, but I suspect that in order to reach the most learners, in the most places, English is going to be more accessible to more people than Korean. Just a hunch, though.
Time to break your expectations then. Sometimes a person who has learned a second language is a better teacher than a native speaker because they understand the difficulties of overcoming the quirks of the second language other than “That’s just how it is” when teaching. (Much love for all those non-native English teachers out there)
