My Russian pupils’ mistakes at their English lessons
- ‘busy’ translated as ‘bus-like’
- ‘happened’ as ‘made someone happy’
- misspelt ‘dictation’ as ‘dicktation’
- “The subject is basically the person or the thing that performs the action in a sentence. What is the subject in this sentence: ’She is watching TV with her husband’?” — “She and her husband"
- a kid once spelt my name as Илезовета (Ilezoveta) instead of Елизавета (Yelizaveta, one of the most common names)
- ‘vegetable’ DOES NOT rhyme with ‘table’
- neither does ‘said’ with ’paid’, and of course though, through, tough, cough, thorough, thought
- in Russian to say that you have something you say smth like ‘In my [possession] is that thing’, У меня есть это. If you literally say ‘I have something’, Я имею это or, god forbid, ‘someone’, that would often mean ‘I screw that thing/person’. So you try to explain that in English you just say ‘to have something’ meaning ‘in my [possession] is that thing’, which often makes pupils begin an English sentence with something like ‘At me there is…’. I once almost translated ‘I have a dictionary on the table’ literally at a lesson with twelve-year-olds
- ‘for what possible reason do you have 16 verb tenses instead of just present, past, and future?’
- there obviously are kids who don’t want to do anything, but I taught a little girl once who broke her right arm and wrote two pages of homework with her left hand (and not that I am terribly strict)
- “How do you spell the word ‘niece’?” — “N-I-E-… and ass’
- “What does the sun do?” — “The sun is sunning”
- you can make your bright pupils learn a lot of vocabulary, complex grammar rules and fix their pronunciation but for some reason no matter how hard you try, only the smartest kids will remember that I write, you write, we write, they write BUT he/she/it writeS
- “Is it true or false?” — “It’s… tralse”