TKD lesson #1

[M.C.]

He was the german general who went to extremes not burning Paris to the ground, defying Hitler in the process. Just having a go at you for your anti-french sentiments :P.

1) You fail at Irony
2) The issue with the pronunciation is true and with my background I just can't stand it
3) I don't have any sentiments against the French, the only "grudge" (if you can call it like that) I have against them is that they kept the "Elsas" and thereby the great "Flamkuchen", give them the land, the people but give me the "Flamkuchen"... so in general "suis moi bit"

[Sang]

My only real issue with your post was this line:

Am I the only person who thinks a French guy is unfit to teach German?

There is much more to teaching a language than being able to speak with an authentic accent, to think that someone is un-qualified for the job because they wern't born in your country is plain wrong.

By your train of thought Americans and Aussies shouldn't be able to teach English since at a later date the Singaporian might run into an Englishman who understands him perfectly but takes offence at the annoying accent.

Probably wouldn't have offended me as much if my fostermother wasn't a frenchwoman who teaches english :smile:

[M.C.]

Well the thing is, my mom used to teach German as a foreign language at University before taking over the Language department. And I have had horrible experiences with people from Germany trying to teach English or Russian and I also have met people who had years of German but they were so bad at speaking the language, you couldn't understand them, even though their writing skills were very good.
Are there some good examples? Well yes some can do it but most can't and I doubt that a high school teacher is qualified enough to teach proper German. And I have suffered in countless English classes listening to people who had no clue how to pronounce the TH, and this was the least of their problems.

[Sang]

Aye there are no doubt a lot of un-qualified teachers in every department, seems to be the type of job no one wants to do. If the teacher in an english class is unable to pronouce TH that is definately a major problem, kind of like a chinese teacher not picking up on a student using wrong tones. I spose it's the difference between accent and mispronounciation, if a language teacher can't speak their language fluently then it is indeed a problem. Personally i don't think i'm qualified to teach English.

The school language system over here is appalling at best, after 3 years of French my understanding was not even the equivilent of lvl 1 of Rosetta Stone Portuguese which i knocked over in two months. The whole purpose of the system seems to just be to meet the requirements of the education board and say 'oh we teach languages here!' as aposed to teaching students how to communicate well with other nationalities.