So you think English is easy?

There are 29 replies in this Thread which has previously been viewed 9,013 times. The latest Post (November 5, 2025 at 1:45 PM) was by Splinter.

1st Official Post

    This is why childhood is the best time to learn a language! Children simply accept these wild linguistic anomalies without questioning, in the same way that they are unselfconscious mimics of foreign sounds.

    One of my wife's friends paid us a visit yesterday. She loves to practice her English which is actually very good considering she rarely gets the opportunity to use it. Anyway...she was chatting away to me and when I mentioned I hated the heat she said I must use protection given I'm a whitey with green eyes. She asked me if she pronounced eyes okay as she gets mixed up when pronouncing ice and eyes. I reassured her it didn't matter as it's the context it's used in that matters more. And anyway I said regional accents in the UK are all different and are hard to understand by people from other regions.

    I once met her late father years ago, he was of Irish extraction.... his grandfather came to Argentina from Cork. Although her father had never been out of Argentina when he spoke to me in English I couldn't believe how much of an Irish accent he had.

    There really is a wide variety of English accents here. A woman I met asked if I knew anyone who could teach her daughter English. Then she hurriedly added that the tutor must be English, as she didn’t want the girl to have an appalling Australian or North American accent. It never occurred to her that she was being insulting!

    Naturally I spent a great deal of time trying to help.

    Quote from Rice

    There really is a wide variety of English accents here. A woman I met asked if I knew anyone who could teach her daughter English. Then she hurriedly added that the tutor must be English, as she didn’t want the girl to have an appalling Australian or North American accent. It never occurred to her that she was being insulting!

    Naturally I spent a great deal of time trying to help.

    ^^

    I've been asked to attend schools, English Institutes as well private English classes in the past which I've had to accept under sufferance all because the people involved were known to my wife.

    Not sure what they expected from me but all I did was chat to the students and answer questions.

    Was never asked back to any of them thankfully.

    • Official Post

    Well, you should all be flattered (maybe you less, Rice ;)).

    Here I haven't found a single person interested in my Italian. There are many Argentinian teachers of Italian, of several variety: from those who speak like a tourist (and shouldn't teach) to those who do pretty good and just have an Argentinian accent.

    After coming here and seeing how many people where so happy to meet me as an Italian, I thought I would be swarmed with requests to go speak Italian to the many classes given here.

    To my surprise, none of this happened. Of course in language schools they were interested in having a native speaker, but no higher pay and no special offer were made. Ever.

    This is why I stopped giving classes. There is just too much competition and little acknowledgement. I am not interested in working for less than 10 USD per hour. There is no money to be made in the language business in Buenos Aires, unless you are the head of a governmental initiative (either Italian or Argentinian).

    But Italian is a language learnt more out of personal interest than out of need. To my surprise, it looks like English teachers are not faring any better. I asked on an expat Facebook group if they were getting paid higher after being established teacher and since they are native speakers, and they all said no.

    So, you should be flattered. Definitely. 8)

    Quote from Splinter

    I'd happily sit around chatting in English as the token English native for $25 an hour, provided they supplied the beer.

    I'd be very convivial in those circumstances.

    Well indeed. All my 'appearances' were unpaid. In fact when we went to the English college in Mercedes we had to shell out the cost of getting there ourselves....they didn't even give us a cup of tea!!

    The most common question I was asked was what type of food they eat in the UK.

    While German is the worst of the languages most commonly studied by English-speakers, I personally am stopped dead in my tracks by all languages requiring not just case but gender and number agreement between nouns and modifiers. Impossible to speak without stopping to think about each one!