Gabriel
Certified Tutor
I have been a passionate student of foreign languages since the beginning of my academic career. Ever since I was a child, I have held a deep fascination with languages, cultures, and ways of doing things foreign to my own. The fun thing is, the deeper I go into a foreign culture, the more I realize I have so much left to learn and experience. My language skills allow me to travel to far off lands and immerse myself and interact with non-English speakers. Did you know that Mandarin Chinese is the most widely-spoken language in the world, with almost 1 billion speakers across 12 countries? The next most widely-spoken language is Spanish, with around 400 million speakers across 31 countries! The third most-widely spoken language is English, which has over 335 million speakers, and as the modern *lingua franca* for international relations and commerce, is spoken in over 100 countries across the world! With mastery of these three global languages, you will find yourself capable of communicating with an enormous 25% of the entire global population! That's a lot of territory! Once you have the language basics down, there remains only one question to ask yourself: Where do you want to go? I look forward to preparing you for you own adventure
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Undergraduate Degree: Lewis & Clark College - Bachelors, Foreign Languages--Mandarin Chinese and Spanish
Graduate Degree: New York University - Masters, Global Affairs
Shaolin Kungfu, Taiqi, Table Tennis, Food
- Conversational Mandarin
- Conversational Spanish
- Languages
- Mandarin Chinese
- Mandarin Chinese 1
- Mandarin Chinese 2
- Mandarin Chinese 3
- Mandarin Chinese 4
- Spanish
- Spanish 1
- Spanish 2
- Spanish 3
- Spanish 4
What is your teaching philosophy?
My teaching philosophy is practical comparison. I like to give practical examples in the target language to which students can identify and relate practical examples from their native language. For example, to make use of practical comparison to further a student’s mastery of Chinese or Spanish pronunciation, word(s) in the target language are sounded out using common phonetic syllables from the native language.
What might you do in a typical first session with a student?
In a typical first session with a new student, we would begin with a number of practice exercises, usually drawn from their existing language classwork or assignments, in order to get general sense of the student's proficiency in the four language fundamentals (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) as well as grammar. Problem-areas in the student's language ability can then be identified and specifically targeted in order to boost proficiency and eventual mastery over their target-language curriculum as well as practical, day-to-day, usage of their target language.