19/1/7

The New Year’s Eve party was a success. Lot’s of people, food, dancing, and even some drinking. We didn’t go to the party in Coyolito, although I did drive Rafa’s family up there. There have been no parties since then, although we did go to a Rosario del Nino party last night at Jose’s, but that is religious, and doesn’t count.

Last year, Zaida and Jose took a few English lessons. Then everyone got busy, and the lessons stopped. This year my neighbour, Joaquin, asked if I would teach two of his children. Tatiana, 14, and Diego, 12, have been coming for two weeks now. Zaida came back, too, and remembers quite a bit from last year. Tatiana and Diego have learned a bit in school, and are quite quick on the uptake. It is a lot of fun teaching people who are smart, and eager to learn.

I would just like to air a complaint. I thought it was a personal complaint, but my new English students all agree with me, and I would like to make their complaint public. Languages don’t make sense. They seem to be written for language teachers. We don’t need to conjugate verbs. We could use the infinitive for all forms of all tenses. We use it for most of the present tense in English, and it makes verbs easier for Spanish speakers, who change it for almost every pronoun. Why do we have to add the “s” for he and she. We could say, yesterday, or tomorrow, “I go to the store”. If we had learned it that way, it would be fine. And other languages would be a lot easier to learn. At least the spelling in Spanish is phonetic. In English, even “phonetic” isn’t spelled phonetically. Thanks for listening.