English as she is spoke

At the very end of last year, we were exchanging books in the Local Local Library LLL [see L]. The same building hosts a Community Hub meeting room outside of which there was a scrappy timetable indicating which aspects of 'community' were hubbing in town. I wasn't pushed about cross-stitch Wedneesday but was interested in the local chapter of Fáilte Isteach: which is a community project involving predominantly older volunteers welcoming migrants through conversational English classes. I am told it started in Co Meath but has now spread nationwide. I sent them an e-mail:

Dear Fáilte Isteach,
I'm retired from teaching science in The Institute and wondered if Conversational English needs another body on the fluent side of the table in the LLL?
Regardless, I think you're doing a fine thing for the community.
Bob 

275 days later, I got a reply ". . . Sorry, I haven't logged into this email address in quite a while! But Yes we are always glad of an extra person to assist, particularly as winter evenings approach". And two evenings later, I shovelled down some dinner, and arrived at LLL on the dot [protestant!] of 19°°hrs. There was one old chap there, whom I know slightly, and eventually two Ukrainian women rocked up for 'class'. They were, apparently, part of a rolling group of 8 or 10 refugees who are regulars matched with 4 or 5 'natives.

I guess there has to be some structure to 'conversation class'; there was for the couple of years of Conversational Portuguese I did in the 1980s before we left England. Our mentor then was a qualified evening-class instructor and we read some newspapers, did a bit of rôle-play [you be the pharmacist, I'll start talking about blisters], a tiny bit of grammar, and some colloquialisms.  But we'd all reached a basic level [some of us very basic] level of fluency. It was good fun and we came to like each other's company.

I was a little taken aback when xerox sheets were handed out with the suggestion "Tonight we'll do adverbs". It was like, on a Buddhist retreat in a meditation session, we were invited to relax the pancreas. There is a word in Russian наречие [nareecheh] and Ukrainian прислівник [presuinik?]. I am the tail-end of the generations who learned 'grammar' in English class at school in the 1960s. But really no anglophone under the age of, say, 55 could tell you the difference between adverbs & adjectives / conjunctions & prepositions although they use words in both categories every day in normal speech and writing. I've forgotten pretty much all the formal grammar I learnt in school 60 years ago but I still speak and write grammatical English. And I'm happy to tell long-dead Mr Evers my English teacher that split infinitives are fine if it sounds okay - caring about not splitting them is a silly pedantic hang-over from Latin where all infinitives are a single unsplittable word. 

Anyway, Adverbs. Not all adverbs end in -ly, although at lot of the are formed from adjectives by adding that suffix: To boldly go where people split infinitives.  There are a whole clatter of common adverbs of place which qualify / describe where such a thing happens. We had a useful discussion on synonyms and 'nearonyms' without using the word synonym under = below; indoors = inside = within. All can be used when buildings are the container; but you can't be indoors a dustbin or a cupboard.

Then there are adverbs of time / frequency. Given the real basic level of last Thursday's learners, I forebore to suggest an exercise in ordering a bunch of similar adverbs of time. Great idea though to nail the nuance of language and I'd bet that there would be disagreement among native English speakers.  Go on: order this list from most to least frequent: always -- eventually -- infrequently -- never -- often -- rarely -- regularly -- seldom -- sometimes -- usually.

Later on Conversation example sheets were handed out. Talking about tire- and oil-changes with the mechanic in a garage fell a bit flat <pfffff!> because neither of our Ukrainian guests could drive. "Talking to the pharmacist" was quite a bit better because one of the women had served 40 years as a nurse in the radiology department of a Ukrainian Fever Hospital. We had an engaged if vocab-inhibited discussion about X-rays, antibiotics and tomography. The word for vitamin is the same вітамін, who knew? I thought it would be OTT to share my hilarious anecdote about how colon dwukropek got confused in Polish/English translation when I was teaching Human Physiology.

That was a week ago. Tomorrow evening, Fáilte Isteach is having open house again [as usual]. I intend to go; hoping for a rollicking good time with the Present Continuous [not!].