The sad referred to the German speaker. 80% is great for one who learns the language as an adult.
And amongst the 20% are newspaper article writers … so feel free 
Then you should try this:
- Ein Werwolf eines Nachts entwich
- von Weib und Kind, und sich begab
- an eines Dorfschullehrers Grab
- und bat ihn: Bitte, beuge mich!
- Der Dorfschulmeister stieg hinauf
- auf seines Blechschilds Messingknauf
- und sprach zum Wolf, der seine Pfoten
- geduldig kreuzte vor dem Toten:
- »Der Werwolf«, – sprach der gute Mann,
- »des Weswolfs« – Genitiv sodann,
- »dem Wemwolf« – Dativ, wie man’s nennt,
- »den Wenwolf« – damit hat’s ein End‘.
- Dem Werwolf schmeichelten die Fälle,
- er rollte seine Augenbälle.
- Indessen, bat er, füge doch
- zur Einzahl auch die Mehrzahl noch!
- Der Dorfschulmeister aber mußte
- gestehn, daß er von ihr nichts wußte.
- Zwar Wölfe gäb’s in großer Schar,
- doch „Wer“ gäb’s nur im Singular.
- Der Wolf erhob sich tränenblind –
- er hatte ja doch Weib und Kind!
- Doch da er kein Gelehrter eben,
- so schied er dankend und ergeben
I love this as it pretty much sums up German in a nutshell.
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Completely of topic but reminds me of;
You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
Probably more suited to the US thread
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Ok … and?
Do or don’t, the choice is yours.
Good teachers and especially language coaches adapt easily to different learning styles and necessities. I guess that specific teacher didn’t meet your needs. Just give it another try with another teacher or try to improve on your own. Maybe you don’t even need to decline correctly for the things you want to do in German. A language coach would be able to counsel you on the latter questions, while more traditional teachers wouldn’t even consider these options.
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Die Werwölfe
Den Werwölfen
Die Werwölfe
Der Werwölfe
When you’re sat in a classroom with a teacher insisting that you learn it their way without being able to explain why, and you’re required to attend said class (I was sent on it by RAV) no, the choice was not mine. The choice I made was to try to educate the teacher to do a better job of it.
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as long as you did that in German …
She was also one of those who adamantly refused to speak a word of English, so yeah.
Was always another thing that bothered me. OK, most of the students were refugees from various non-English speaking countries, so obviously they wouldn’t be helped by explanations in English, but why deny it to someone it could help, as if it were showing some sort of favouritism?
There are some concepts that can be difficult to grasp but can, with the right words, be very simply explained. I recall one example where I’d been struggling with the future tense, or rather the lack thereof. The verb werden is all back to front compared with at least two ways of making a future tense in English, French and Italian, and I couldn’t get my head round it, the teaching of course was all about just using it, not explaining it.
Then one day it came to me, and I said to the teacher Oh, it just means “will be”. Yes.
How difficult would it have been to say that in the first place? Another Grrrr. from me.
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Group classes, especially those with students with different mother tongues, often are a pain in the arse, for both students and teachers. A one-on-one language coaching is more expensive short term, but it pays off long term, because the neurolanguage coaching methodology actively reconnects every learning step with your mother tongue. A language coach will guide you through every stage of the learning process and the frequency of sessions can be weekly or even every fortnight. Group classes are just so overrated.
Wasted time, every time I’ve tried it.
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My experience was just the opposite.
It was only with group classes that I finally started to make progress.
IME one-on-one lessons were much more of a waste of my time, as that set up gave me little opportunity, or motivation, to actually use German outside the narrow constraints of the lesson plan. For me, one on one tuition (and I tried two teachers) was too artificial, rigid. In contrast, the various group classes I’ve taken added what to me was a needed dynamic, another level of interaction, which helped me more towards my primary goal of navigating everyday life.
We all have different learning styles - which is why I disliked your broad statement. Individual tuition might have been right for you, but certainly it was a less effective approach for me. The key is to understand one’s own learning style and find resources best suited to support that.
Hands down the best class I ever took was a group class where the ‘text book’ was the newspaper. First the 20min, then as we progressed the Tagi, then finally the NZZ. We read articles and then discussed them as a group - content, meaning, and yes, writing style and grammar. The group dynamic kept me motivated in a way none of the one-to-one classes I’d taken ever did.
That’s me - YMMV. And that’s fine. There are different paths towards the same goal.
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Better for whom?
Not everyone learns in the same way and her approach may have worked better for the majority of the students.
Just because you like to learn in a certain way doesn’t mean that it would work for somebody else.
A good teacher learns to adapt to their students’ needs. If most of the class are happy with how things are then it would be silly to change it but the teacher could make some time at the end of the lesson or even in the break to explain the whys and wherefores to those who want to know.
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For me the best language school was one where they did role playing so
Buying a train ticket
Booking a hotel room
Buying Groceries (it was 30 years ago when you actually went into a shop and told them what you wanted)
&&&&
I found that very useful.
Sadly I do not remember which language school it was so long ago
After the train ticket lesson I went to Zürich HB and in my best German ordered a ticket and the clerk answered me in perfect English “First or Second class?”
Blöd
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Actually better for all, because then I, being in possession of an explanation I could understand, would then occupy less of her time asking questions she didn’t seem willing or able to answer, letting her focus on the rest of the class.
Yes, I have a, err, ‘special’ learning style which very occasionally clashes with some individuals’ fixed teaching styles. My point was that a good teacher, (or BASI trainer, from another example) should be expected to adapt to their students’ learning style, not the other way around.
I’m the same. Very annoying to some it seems. But good teachers found out quickly that answering my concrete questions clearly in fact saved them a lot of time.
There’s no point in standard explanations if a student needs to know one single little thing and even knows how to pose the question.
I taught adults for a few years (on webdesign, html etc. etc.) and always listened well to their questions as they reveal where their problem understanding lies even if they’re not able to ask concretely.
It goes even further than that, as I can say from my experience of learning, and later teaching, to ski. A good instructor should know when the message has not been understood, or they’re not able to work with a articular approach, and use a different explanation/demo/exercise instead.
There’s no point in continuing with a method that has already failed to work. Isn’t that somebody’s definition oh madness, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome?
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This. As - back to languages - I watched a million times people talking to foreigners who didn’t understand something, repeating it the same way/with the same words over and over again when changing the words/sentence one single time would solve the problem fast. And worse: saying that same thing louder and louder and LOUDER … as if the person were deaf. 
I actually think it’s very arrogant.
It is also kind of useless to teach a person who comes from let’s say out in the country in Somalia, maybe never been to school and just tell them to follow rules like dativ, genitiv …
That is also the reason we have “cultural translaters”. There is no point in translating the rules of the second pillar to a person from Eritrea. You have to explain what the heck second pillar is. From scratch.
(Maybe that’s changed the past 10 years, they might have that too now but I kind of doubt it).
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Yeah, it perhaps makes sense on advanced level. The entry levels are very stiff, and the worst thing is that they will place you on some level, where you might already know bits and words of much more advanced level but lack knowledge about some basic things which were taught on level -1 or so.
I did a French evening class like that back in the UK, probably 35 years ago now. We used a weekly magazine l’Express, plus the teacher, who was actually French, would tape some radio programs, usually current affairs discussions and we would then discuss them. It was specifically required that class members could already speak French well enough to understand most of it,
Very useful, but not really so much teaching you the language as just enabling you to practice and improve fluency and at the same time gain a understanding of French attitudes and culture.
And indeed politics, it being a vaguely right-of-centre publication which generated lots of interesting discussions. (This was the '80s though, so it was still probably somewhat to the left of the Thatcher-era attitudes that were normal in the UK at that time.)
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