helping teach english O.O

[Cream Soda]

I have a foreign friend who has only been here a copule years. She understands the language for the most part aside from complicated words. Her main problem lies in pronunciation and how many words have the same meaning. Is there a site I could go to or something that would help me teach her better? Like how to work on pronunciation, ect. I've never taught a language before, so I have no clue where to start.

[Dezzimal]

Pe nis, penis.

[Komm Suesser Tod]

Actually, my wife is from Spain, and even though she's been here for years, and has a degree in English Philology, and still makes mistakes in English. The best thing you can do for her is just talk with her, be with her when she talks, and when she makes a mistake, say something about it.

Repetition is the best way to learn a language, and even the smartest of people will slip up in a language they aren't familiar in.

[Ksandra]

Actually, my wife is from Spain, and even though she's been here for years, and has a degree in English Philology, and still makes mistakes in English. The best thing you can do for her is just talk with her, be with her when she talks, and when she makes a mistake, say something about it.

Repetition is the best way to learn a language, and even the smartest of people will slip up in a language they aren't familiar in.

^ if you really want to do an activity with them, I would suggest have them read out loud newspaper articles to you. For every word she mispronounces correct her. Repetition is the best, and just reading out loud will help a lot.

[Lbelle]

dictionary.com has pronunciations of each word

[Iono]

Pretty much what they said. English is a fucked up language, to teach and learn alike.
If you want something sort of concrete there's this site :: Phonetics Focus - A Sound Choice :: But if it's harder words she has problems with, then she needs repetition.

[Despain]

From what I've come to understand... English is by far one of the hardest languages to learn in contemporary society, although I may be wrong.

I lived in the Dominican Republic until I was 7 years old, in which point I moved to the United States. I had no idea how to speak even the smallest amount of English, but in a couple of weeks I had a rudimentary understanding of the language. From that, I took it to the next level and learned a higher level of vocabulary and grammar... granted that ESOL classes helped a ton.

Basically, repetition is key. Classes help, but in the end its all up to you and how dedicated you are in learning a new language. Then again, I had a nice backbone to help me learn English, and that's that Spanish and English have a lot of similarities and common grammar.

I also found out that watching TV helped a ton. I don't know if that sounds ridiculous or not, but me watching a ton of cartoons and playing videogames really strengthened my vocabulary. Playing FFXI has honestly taught me a lot in that department D: as I hate typing in "leet" speak and all that jazz.

[Beckwin]

conversation and read-aloud. do correct mistakes. enunciate and speak slowly if necessary while making corrections. have her repeat the word after you say it correctly; mimicking sounds is pretty easy for people and enough repetitions hardwires it.

going through a phonics book could be helpful... not sure what an adult would use though.

[MF Perm tha Fineass]

conversation and read-aloud. do correct mistakes. enunciate and speak slowly if necessary while making corrections. have her repeat the word after you say it correctly; mimicking sounds is pretty easy for people and enough repetitions hardwires it.

going through a phonics book could be helpful... not sure what an adult would use though.

Nah man teach him fucked up slang like "That pussy is uppy hike, yo!" But use it when people are eating hamburgers or mowing the lawn. Enjoy life forever.

[Sol-Blackguy]

Just straight up conversation is probably the easiest. These 2 mexican girls kept talking to me for at least a year and learned. Aside from picking up on sarcasm and jokes, they wound up pretty fluent.

[Retrieving/C.D/Searain]

From what I've come to understand... English is by far one of the hardest languages to learn in contemporary society, although I may be wrong.

It's by far the easiest, trust me. Stuff like french, italian, swedish, dutch and japanese are leaps and bounds harder to pick up and excel at, in comparison.

OP, if she hasn't gotten a hang of it despite being there for a couple years already, chances are that she's reached a point where her english won't get any better no matter what, usually stuff like pronunciation gets fixed rather quickly once you actually start speaking the language more frequently.

My english ain't that great either (I couldn't get a rid of my accent completely for example, I've been sorta talking like a character from The Sopranos all along but I can't help it) but it got much better very quickly when I started dating foreign girls (swedish, american, etc.) who wouldn't speak anything else, and by quickly I mean a couple of weeks, perhaps a month at worst. Significant improvements took place when I ditched thinking in italian (while talking to an english-speaking person, that's it) in favor of thinking directly in english (cue Clint Eastwood's Firefox), although she might have been doing that already, who knows.

Make her watch tons of TV shows (US elections televised debates are the best for those who're still learning due to the fact that politicians generally go that extra mile to make you understand what they're blabbing about whereas comedic skits such as Frank Caliendo's and Pablo Francisco's are among the hardest stuff to understand for a foreigner since they talk insanely fast and you won't get most of their jokes unless you're drenched in american culture circa 1970~present) and play FFXI on daily basis, if anything she'll get to learn some slang lol.

Other than that...well, point out her mistakes often, that way she will be less likely to make them in the future, however avoid being condescending because it's fucking irritating, especially when you're doing your best to keep up with your interlocutor (I had this chick laffing out loud each and every time I made a pronunciation mistake, she said it was "adorable" but it made me hate her in the long run anyway, lol).

EDIT: btw, these message boards are pretty useful if you're looking for advices:
WordReference Forums
UsingEnglish.com ESL Forum

[Faris]

for me, it was like others mentioned, conversations.

and i highly suggest reading anything and everything. And of course the daily dosage of TV

[toonces]

nooooes, don't teach her more english. She allready knows good enough. You going to kill the sexy accent!

[Ksandra]

It's by far the easiest, trust me. Stuff like french, italian, swedish, dutch and japanese are leaps and bounds harder to pick up and excel at, in comparison.

you must be crazy to put japanese on the list. There are like NO rule exceptions. It was so easy to learn when I did XD Sadly though I never practiced after getting out of school and forgotten pretty much everything ;; Latin and Spanish were also imo easier to learn than English would be.

[Jodwahh]

Nah English is easy, even babies can learn it :D

[Hyan]

you must be crazy to put japanese on the list. There are like NO rule exceptions. It was so easy to learn when I did XD Sadly though I never practiced after getting out of school and forgotten pretty much everything ;; Latin and Spanish were also imo easier to learn than English would be.

This. Although English is the only 2nd language I speak fluently, I'd say that from that list only french would be more difficult than english is. I studied swedish for 6 years and although I don't speak it well it was only my attitude that was on the way of learning it properly (they forced me to study it >_>). It was easy as heck. JP was even easier.

Pronounciation is the worst, it just doesn't make sense to me sometimes. Same as french <_<.

Btw veg, for me it helped to watch lots of english TV- learned surprisingly much that way (especially about the pronounciation).

[Darus Grey]

The pronunciations make perfect sense. The problem with English is our shitty 26 letter Alphabet with ~140 sounds. Learning IPA puts all the peices of the puzzle together...but no one writes in IPA besides linguists.

Also...Japanese has as many "exceptions" as other languages, when you compare a broad spectrum most languages follow the same exact trends when it comes to conjugation. Japanese and Chinese are especially bad though once you look at the Orthography, because Kanji is just an exercise in ambiguity... often relying on context outside the work of text to have any meaning.

English is a special exception in and of itself, because it's the world's dominant language. There's almost always one of these at any point in history...parasitic languages that feed off everything around them and form this mess. Latin was one, Greek was one, at a point in time the ancestors of hebrew was one.

Dominant languages have their own unique rules and trends compared to other languages.

[guartz]

Make her watch kid shows. (Seasame street for example)

[Ksandra]

The pronunciations make perfect sense. The problem with English is our shitty 26 letter Alphabet with ~140 sounds. Learning IPA puts all the peices of the puzzle together...but no one writes in IPA besides linguists.

Also...Japanese has as many "exceptions" as other languages, when you compare a broad spectrum most languages follow the same exact trends when it comes to conjugation. Japanese and Chinese are especially bad though once you look at the Orthography, because Kanji is just an exercise in ambiguity... often relying on context outside the work of text to have any meaning.

English is a special exception in and of itself, because it's the world's dominant language. There's almost always one of these at any point in history...parasitic languages that feed off everything around them and form this mess. Latin was one, Greek was one, at a point in time the ancestors of hebrew was one.

Dominant languages have their own unique rules and trends compared to other languages.

Every language has exceptions, but you can't honestly say Japanese has the same as English. They only really have two instances where a phonetic letter is pronounced a different way. All their exceptions are based on actual grammar which is in every language. As long as you hiragana/katakana you can pretty much pronounce 99% of the words written in that form. Most American schools now only teach the first basic phonics of the alphabet, and everything else is sight words, because our rules apply to so few words, that many find it a waste of time (they are semi-wrong though I think it's retarded they don't teach e makes the long vowel sound in CVCV words.) Kanji I can understand being more difficult, but we're mostly talking about the speaking here, and more and more often, you have hurigana above the kanji symbols anyways. I remember hearing that there is a small movement in Japan to get ride of Kanji altogether, would be a smart idea imo.