Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bassexpander]

I have so many students who say, "English is very hard to me."

I corrected one of them today, but he asked what the reason/rule is that we use "for" instead of "to" here.

How would you explain it?

[bassexpander]

Another one:

It is very funny to me.

[Tobias]

I just tell 'em to 'do your damn homework.'

What is it with these Korean people and their attitude towards homework?
I'm getting really tired of being labled a 'good' teacher when I know my kids only like me because I'm 'fun', yet I know they aren't learning enough.

I guess it brings job security, this "It took me three years to learn my personal pronouns, Tee-Chur" BS. They get one week to learn those with me.

[gangpae]

[ursus_rex]

English is very hard for me "to do".

English is very funny for me "to do".

The first makes sense... the latter doesn't.

[gangpae]

I think that English is difficult.

[Tobias]

[Suwon23]

English prepositions are often illogical. You sit in a chair but on a sofa, in November but on Tuesday, watch what's on TV (not in TV, as they say in German), etc. Your students will just have to accept that the language of their colonial overlords is a fickle and uncaring yoke to be born about the shoulders like a mantle of thorns.

Overuse of "to" seems pretty common. I hear "tell to me" and "look to the book" all the time.

Sometimes it helps to teach my kids to memorize the preposition as part of the verb or noun, such as "to look at" rather than just "to look."

[Bibbitybop]

I will help a bit if they come to my office, but I don't teach grammar courses. I will spend an hour working with them on what we cover in the course. I will spend 15 minutes on grammar. Same thing goes for covering economics and science: Not my course.

[withnail]

I think a very important thing to teach your students early on is the concept of a collocation or "a group of words which go together" They just go together! After this, you can reply with "collocation" when you get these kinds of questions.

why do we say "I'm bad at English" instead of "I'm bad in English"

There seems to be no logical reason. It is simply that this is a fixed structure which must be learned. The only reason the latter is wrong is just because we don't say that!


In this case "at" is a dependent preposition and it is more useful to learn the structure adjective + at + noun = structure to describe a person's ability in a certain area than ask why X number of alternatives are not also possible! We wouldn't get a satisfactory answer anyway.

With students, I found the best thing to do was to explain a collocation as words which always go together and ask:

How come we say: school uniform and not school clothes? Answer because these words do not naturally go together/do not collocate. (I'm sure you can think of a better example!)

There's no reason why school clothes should be wrong and we even understand it clearly but it isn't natural for us to say that. school uniform is a natural collocation whereas school clothes is not.

With your 2 examples, the combinations offered by students are not natural collocations/do not collocate.

In one of my former schools, a common student stereotype was "Mr Can I also say..."

Swiss Germans were obsessed with finding out which of their suggestions would be just as acceptable as what the teacher taught. In the end it came down to this: Your suggestion is not a natural collocation.

Yours is indeed a tricky problem and if the students are too low to be taught this word, it might just come down to: special case, ok?

[Privateer]

[withnail]

Also, in a couple of your examples, we can use both to and for!

I think this is good for us but of limited value for the students. You are going to get bogged down in an explanation which helps no one.

I suppose it really depends on the proficiency level of the students concerned as to whether they can cope with explanations at all.

I think collocation is the easiest.

[Bread]

[Chamchiman]

I'm hard for English.

[hagwonnewbie]

I'm so hard today, too.