There is a hilarious radio show on Saturday mornings (where I live) on NPR. It is called “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”. It’s a news and current events quiz show featuring, among other things, a segment called “Not My Job”. In this segment, someone, usually famous, is called upon to answer questions totally outside their area of expertise or experience. They have had astronauts, politicians, reporters, authors and nearly everything else on the show doing their best to answer questions they have no reasonableness of knowing.
I am beginning to understand the challenge a little.
Several times over the last couple of weeks, we have been going to the local Theological University (the school that sponsors the Translation Center) and helping teach English to the students there.
Thankfully they have a curriculum and the usually instructors usually stay with us, and they mostly just want the students to be able to practice English with native speakers.
However, we want to be as much help to them as we can and they often have difficult questions about how English works. (and we often have no idea how to answer them)
We take it for granted because we grew up speaking it. And thank goodness because English is a ridiculously difficult language to try to learn. (and to try and teach as well)
Sometimes the instructors have questions for us, and even if we know how it works…it is a far different thing to explain why it works, so they can learn how to figure it our for themselves. Especially when their national language is fairly orderly and tends to follow most of its own rules, rather than trying to break all of them like English.
Even though the alphabets are mostly the same, the sounds they represent are often different. And while the basic grammatical components are there, they come in different orders and with different complexities. How many tenses does a language really need anyways? English has how many? And what if your language doesn’t have articles like English? How can “you” be both singular and plural? Can you explain how Americans use slang?
The English instructors at UKIT have a very challenging task before them., and English is not even their first language.
Again and again Indonesians come up to me and apologize for not speaking much English and then compliment me on my Indonesian. They are far too humble. We all ought to send thank you cards to our grammar teachers and be a lot more patient with people on the phone or at the store who stumble through trying to communicate with us. Remember that English is easy for us because we have been working at it for years.
