She understands everything and answers in German. He speaks Turkish with his grandmother and cannot write her a message. This is the most common shape of the problem and it is not a discipline failure — a language that is only ever heard at home stops at the point where writing would have started.
Online, one to one. Lessons are in Turkish. I speak to parents in Turkish, so there is nothing lost between us.
First I find out what the child actually has, which is almost never what the parent thinks. Listening is usually strong, speaking is shy, reading is partial and writing is absent. Each of those needs a different fix and lumping them together is why these lessons often fail.
Then we teach reading and writing properly, the way it is taught in a Turkish classroom, because the alphabet is honest and a child who can hear the language already has most of what the task needs.
Speaking gets rebuilt by removing the cost of getting it wrong. A child who is corrected on every sentence stops making sentences. I let a great deal go and come back to it later.
Usually, yes, and it is the most common reason families write to me. A child with strong comprehension has the hard part already done.
What is missing is almost always confidence rather than knowledge. That takes a few months of low-stakes talking with someone who is not a parent, which turns out to matter — children will risk mistakes in front of a teacher that they will not risk at home.
From about six, when a child is learning to read in their school language and can transfer that idea.
Younger than that I would rather you read to them in Turkish every day than pay me. I will tell you that on the first call and I do not mind saying it.
No. Lessons are in Turkish, which for this track is the point — your child needs hours in the language, and an hour conducted in German is an hour lost.
I speak to you in Turkish, so nothing is lost between parent and teacher either. This page is in English and there are pages in German, Arabic and Russian so you know what you are arranging.
Once a week keeps a language; twice a week grows one. For a child who is losing Turkish rather than adding it, once a week plus reading at home is usually enough.
Frequency matters far less here than what happens on the other six days, and we will talk about that part too.
Yes, if there is a reason — a planned move to Turkey, an exam, a school that asks for it. Tell me the target and we will work back from it.
Without a reason I would rather teach the child in front of me than a syllabus written for a classroom they are not in.
Tell me what you are after and roughly where you are starting from. I answer within one working day with a price and two or three possible times.