Best Day/Worst Day

“The present is the present, tomorrow is a mystery.”  –anonymous 4A student

Sorry for taking so long to get my comments up about this class. Actually, I have a few excuses. The first is that I wanted the commercials to be at the top so anyone could see them easily. Someone told me that he/she came to the blog and could not see the commercials easily. I don’t understand because they were right at the top of the page. Anyway, if you have not seen the commercials yet, I highly suggest that you check below.

It was quite a long time ago that we talked about the best/worst days of our lives.

The question that we started out the class with was:
“What was the best/worst thing to happen to you today?” 
This question was easily changed by trading today with this week, this month, this year, this decade. 

I thought the best and worst things that happened to people that day to be quite interesting. Some of the things were very small. In this initial conversation I noticed that quite a few students were having problems with the ‘th’ sound in English. Words like birthday, month, months, and think caused some problems.

Another error that I hear quite a lot is confusing interesting and interested.
I was interesting in your opinion. >>> I was interested in your opinion. 
Your opinion was interesting for me. 

I think most of you already know the differences, it is just a matter of using the words correctly. The sentence that I often use to help students remember this distinction is, “Bowling is boring.”  I hope this helps you to remember.

One phrase that I hear  quite a lot is, “I expect tomorrow.” This means that I think tomorrow is going to come. I hope that everyone expects tomorrow. I think a much more likely sentence would be, “I am looking forward to tomorrow,” or “I am excited about tomorrow.” 

Because the topic was best/worst days, many of the guys talked about their army service. For many people the worst day was joining the army and the best day was leaving. I did not expect that everyone would have such similar experiences. One question that I heard a few times was, “What was your charge in the army?” I cannot say that this is wrong, but I would be much more likely to say, “What did you do in the army?” or “What was your job/duty in the army?” 

A very common error for Korean students is to say, “I talked about my friend.” Actually this is perfectly fine English, it just means that my friend was the topic of conversation when I talked with another person. If I had a conversation with my friend I would need to say, “I talked with/to my friend.” 

We still had some problems with choice, choose, chose, and chosen. Click here if you want to see this explained again.

A final point is about the phrase, “frankly speaking.” I honestly, truly feel that I have never said this while in America. Please trust me. I truthfully don’t remember saying this. I feel that maybe American English speaking is already direct so we don’t need to say this, or maybe we would say truthfully instead.