English is Difficult

As I said in a blog entry a couple of months ago, the job I have pays enough to live off of each month, but if I want to do extra traveling, shopping or saving up ,I have to find additional income.  The way that assistants do this is give private classes to people who are willing to pay you by the hour for English lessons.  To be honest, I had absolutely no trouble finding students to give private lessons to.  Once I talked to people in town and told them who I was, they either asked me if I was giving classes, or I asked them if they were interested in taking classes because many, many people are either studying or want to practice English.  

I have three very different students that I give private lessons to.

One of my students is a teacher at my school.  This works out really well for me because I do not have to sacrifice my time outside of school to give her lessons.  It works out well for her also because she is a mother and lives in the city of Granada, so she does not have time to have classes during the evenings or weekends.

Conveniently, we just happened to have two free hours during the school day that match up.  With her, we look through her work book and she always has questions that she doesn't understand that she saves for me.  She is the students that has the most difficult questions for me because her questions are things like, "What is the difference between price and cost?"  or, "How do you use therefore vs thus vs meanwhile vs while vs other sets of words that are very similar to each other in a sentence?" or, "Why do you use the past tense in this sentence and not future?"  She is always challenging me to come up with examples and explanations and I am always questioning my knowledge of the English language, but I enjoy it because I am always learning new things while teaching her.  Then we usually spend another hour working on vocabulary and conversation.  I teach her colloquial words and phrases that she could use in daily conversations with native English speakers.

My second student is a nine year old girl, who is the niece of another teacher at my school.  My classes with her are very, very different and much less challenging.  Usually we listen to songs that she has to memorize for English class over and over again to make sure she gets all of the words right, or we review the alphabet, numbers and colors with flash cards and then we play lots of hangman and bingo.  My goal for my classes with her is to have her speaking more English than Spanish by the end of the year.  With phrases that she says often in Spanish, I try to repeat in English.  Like when we are playing hangman and she says, "me toca"  I make sure to repeat, "My turn" every time.  We'll see how it goes!

My last student is actually a friend of mine who is my age.  I will be spending four hours a week with him to help him out with his English homework for school and to work on extra things.  He knows the very, very basics, but wants to improve his conversational skills, vocabulary and grammar.  I look forward to working with him a lot and I believe that because of his current level, I will see him improve A LOT over the next seven months. 

Now that I have been working here for about a month, I am realizing just how complicated and confusing the English language is.  People ask me questions about grammar that I have never though of before.  Until I arrived here, I had never heard of a phrasal verb, but I use them every day (ex. lay down, hold on, get up, care for, bring up, etc...) and I never knew what each verb tense was actually called in English and when I used them, but now I am becoming very aware of what tense I am using.

Also, as I am doubting my knowledge of the English language, I am often told that what I say is wrong.  You see, here in Spain, they study British English, not American English.  Some of the grammar and vocabulary is completely different between the two different types of English.  When I am faced with an English word that I have never heard, I can USUALLY guess what it is, but other times I have no clue.

For example-

Grammar:

• American English:  Do you have a pencil?  Yes, I have a pencil.  She doesn't have a pencil.
• British English:  Have you got a pencil?  Yes, I've got a pencil.  She hasn't got a pencil.

Whenever I am asking questions from the book, I feel really silly saying "have you got," but this is what they know and have learned so I go along with it.

Vocabulary:

• American English: Trash, candy, truck, eraser, adverts, etc...
• British English: Rubbish, sweets, lorry, rubber, commercials, etc...

I repeat.  English is difficult.  I had no idea I would learn so much English in addition to Spanish here.  It's been a very interesting experience.  I feel like I need to go open up an English grammar book now...

Random photo of Baza