German tutoring for secondary school

German is a language whose difficulty does not build gradually, it arrives at the start. Cases, noun gender and word order all turn up in the first year and turn up together, so a pupil struggling then is not necessarily bad at the language; they are on the steepest part of the road. The reverse holds just as often: a child who found the beginning easy, carried along by words that look like English ones, meets the wall later, when subordinate clauses start pushing the verb to the end and recognising vocabulary stops helping. So a first year mark predicts the rest poorly, and it is usually the thing families decide about tutoring on. Hire someone the moment the first weak mark lands and there is a fair chance you have paid for the year the child would have climbed out of anyway, while the help is genuinely needed in the third, by which time the money and the goodwill are gone. A fairer test is simple and costs nothing. Take any passage from the textbook and ask your child to say out loud why the verb sits where it sits. A pupil who can answer has a system in their head and will get through the harder part. One who says it just sounds right is running on ear alone, and that is the moment a lesson is actually worth buying, whatever the mark says. Being in the room has one specific advantage here. Word order is not explained so much as demonstrated: you write the sentence out and then move the pieces around by hand until it is clear what changes. That is quicker across a table than by any other means. The first lesson is free. Spend it on that test rather than on a plan of the syllabus.