"Can I Help You?"

A somewhat low key bloomsday today. To understate the situation somewhat.

Anybody passing by, or lurking, do drop in with a comment. Needn't relate to a particular posting. The odd 'hello' would be nice; it would also go some way to removing that nagging fear I sometimes get in the quiet hour in the afternoon when I can't sleep, that perhaps my flight crashed on the way here, and I'm in some peculiar purgatory.

Spent an hour or two today going for John and Liz Soars with a (somewhat blunt, perhaps) scalpel. The autopsy revealed what I'd always suspected: 'New Headway' is highly successful bollocks.

Comments

  1. AnonymousThu Jun 16, 03:59:00 pm BST

    'Hello'

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousThu Jun 16, 08:50:00 pm BST

    Speaking personally, and without going into specifics, I've always felt that the Present Perfect should be introduced to students much earlier than most coursebooks do it... given that native speakers (although not necessarily Americans, who seem to me to try and avoid it) use it so much.
    Concerning Headway... like practically every other book I can think of, far too Eurocentric.
    Translation? Oh no, definitely not, except within very clearly defined circumstances. 'Book', 'table', stuff, concrete things, okay... but concepts? Truth? Freedom? Democracy? To Muslims? They may have words in Arabic which they might equate with our words, but be sure that the meaning, the ideas (and, of necessity, the culture) which underlie them are very different.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Garry NixonSat Jun 18, 03:10:00 pm BST

    Americans are often incapable of using the perfect. My objection with New Headway beginner is that 'have got' could be (Can be, I did it this morning!) taught without reference to its tense - it's so well used, a native speaker would have to consider for a moment what tense it was.

    As for concepts... "Be careful what you say, sir! We're on board ship 'ere!"

    ReplyDelete

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