Last week and this week on Wednesday, I had fun lessons with one of my Orange students. She is fortunate to have a lesson alone quite often. Last week I taught the lesson “Adjectives 1” and under “Opinion” I wrote up “useful” and “useless” and used the remote control for the CD player to practice these words. She got it right away and said she would use “useless” the next time she speaks with her husband when he is lying around the house doing nothing. This week when she came to class I asked her what was new and she told me that she said “You’re useless!” to her husband and he responded with “Oh my god!” She said that they had a good laugh but she felt good that she could say how she felt about him sometimes in English even easier than in Japanese. It seems that learning a language can give you freedom to express feelings you may not be able to do in your native language.
Al Bartle (Smith’s School of English – Okamoto)
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