In my spare time; tutoring English and guinea pig for student cook.

With Random back in the States working to get all the i-s’ dotted and t-s’ crossed for S. to join him, she has been working hard to prepare herself. She has been taking English classes and teaching herself how to cook.

She has elected me as the guinea pig for her cooking, which I am happy to report has been very good. She has let me sample some great vegetarian fried rice.

This evening she stopped by with some chicken and rice curry. She also brought some home work from her English class for me to check over. We went over her work and she had a few mistakes but certainly much better than my efforts so far with Thai.

I guess it’s true of any language, when it is your native tongue you don’t stop to consider how many strange and convoluted rules there are until you actually sit down and try to explain it to a non native speaker.

All the different rules for tenses, prepositional phrases, articles, conditional adjectives and verbs which do seem to be overly complicating when you take a look at them.

Part of the challenge for me helping S. is that a lot of her home work is translation from Thai to English. The Thai is naturally written in their alphabet so I don’t have a clue what she’s starting with. This can make a big difference when she shows me translations such as:

When is it she open shop?

Think of the possibilities of what the original Thai question may not realize English can have for that.

When did she open the shop?
When had she opened the shop?
When does she open the shop?
When will she open the shop?

When was the last time you even thought about such mid numbing terms as participles, pluperfect tenses, or gerunds? Do American kids even still diagram sentences? Does my having that skill constitute more evidence that I am becoming a dinosaur?

Who can tell me what is a predicate adjective, a nominative, connective conjunction, or what the past imperfect of the verb “to be” is?

I’m not complaining about helping S. She is a very nice person and I like helping people anyway. I have started looking at some ESL (English as Second Language) sites on line to review and find some ways to help her more.

Maybe I can talk her into helping me with my Thai. Even if she isn’t brave enough (perhaps “foolish enough” might be a better phrase to use) for that, getting to be taste tester of her good cooking is payment enough.