October 1, 2010: Hungarian lesson

October 1, 2010: I'm glad to begin my weekend. Although my classes went fairly well today, I had five classes in a row with a 20 minute lunch break between the fourth and fifth classes. It's exhausting standing up in front of a class teaching conversational English that long. Since I've created special easier dialogs for the beginning English classes, the students there seem to be following things more easily. Even the few boys who truly are beginners as opposed to "false beginners" are doing well. However, as feared, there are some students who actually seem a bit disappointed at my making things easier. You really can't please everyone. Then, in my intermediate English class, I've decided that starting next week, I'm going to make things a bit more challenging for them by giving them a dictation and making special dialogs for them that contain idioms. These students have died to have more challenging lessons for some time, although we'll see how proficient they truly are after I've graded their first exam this weekend. 

Of course this now means that I'll have to prepare separate dialogs for each level of class I teach, but I think the students will prosper with specially tailored dialogs for their level of English. After all, they'll all be studying all of their subjects using only English starting next year and will need to be proficient by then. The good news is that students at all levels are no longer afraid to approach me to ask questions -- everything to whether and what I've taught before coming to Hungary to telling me about a funny youtube video that they thought I might enjoy watching.

After school, I went to meet a friend of Fekete Kati who wants to learn English in exchange for her teaching me Hungarian. This friend is an aerobics teacher and she has some fundamental English abilities (at least her English is better than my Hungarian) and we had a good time exchanging English and Hungarian words and phrases for a couple of hours. She's a very enthusiastic and engaging student/teacher and I'm sure we'll have a good time interacting this way. As far as I'm concerned, I can't learn enough Hungarian fast enough. It is SOOOO frustrating not being able to do the simplest things because of my inadequacy in Hungarian (e.g., having Gabor help me buy a new phone plan and having Laci help me decipher what the doctor is telling me, etc.) Meanwhile, the students seem to take extra pleasure in teaching me Hungarian equivalents to sentences I'm teaching them in their dialogs. A good teaching technique to get them interested in my lessons??? (Plus I get to learn Hungarian this way)

Later in the evening my private student came to my apartment for our English lesson. As I said before, he's a pretty advanced student and just needs the opportunity to exercise his English with someone who will make periodic corrections to his pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary. One thing I've found with Hungarian speakers of English is that they always accent the first syllable of every word. This is because that's what's done in speaking Hungarian. It's a constant battle for Hungarians to accent any other syllable other than the first one. I guess that's one way to know if one is speaking to a Hungarian in English is to listen for this.

Plans for upcoming trips: It looks like I'll be taking two trips to neighboring countries in the next couple of months:

• November 2 - 7: I'll be going to Romania to Transylvania with a group of teachers from CETP. We'll be staying in Hungarian houses on this tour so it will mean more than just staying at hotels along the way. Among places I'll be going to is Dracula's Castle which is supposed to be very light and beautiful. However, I'm taking my garlic necklace anyway just in case.
• December 11: I'll be going to Vienna with the 9B class. This is a day trip and we'll be visiting the key sites of Vienna. Total cost is ~$13.