Tony TP#11

Today I began my tutoring session with Caglar. He's a turkish student who majored in engineering and is currently studying for the GRE. That must be a task akin to studying for the LSAT in Arabic. I'm really impressed. I entered his appartment and after asking me to take my shoes off offered me Turkish tea and cookies. When we sat down we decided that writing and speaking were going to be are areas of focus for the day. For the speaking poriton I divided it into two parts. First to tell me about Turkey and his GRE studies, then to read an article in the NewYork times. He paused to show me a funny clip, The famous "I would like to buy a hamburger" skit from the Pink Panther. He had a large list of phrases he asked me to explain and when i had done so, I asked him to write each in a sentence, applying the corrections from the speaking lesson plans. I noticed 4 key flaws in his English. First he had problems pronouncing the "th" sounds. Second his verbs did not always match the tense of his subjects. Third, the article "the" needed to be placed before his nouns and finally he needed practice in conjugating and when to use the various forms of "to be." I'll be going back tomorrow for another lesson.