Lockdown!
The World Health Organization says it’s a bad idea…
Graphs of daily deaths show they don’t have a big impact…
Sweden proves there’s another strategy that doesn’t damage the society…
But this week, much of Europe went back to a combination of curfews, lockdowns and mandatory tests.
This was the scene from my balcony Saturday night.
And from the other side.
As you can see, there wasn’t much going on.
And I’m in the center.
The heart of the city.
This is how it usually looks.
And that was a Monday morning.
Oh, well.
Looks like I missed the party.
At least I’ll have a quiet sleep.
Conversations With Teachers
Another good thing about being back in Europe is my friends.
Most are not English native speakers.
That means I can ask them about their experiences learning English.
Sunday I took a walk with a Slovak who used to teach English.
In fact, she studied it at university.
And she actually taught me an English word.
It’s “morphology.”
Do you know what it means?
It means, “waste of time.”
Because, she told me after years of studying morphology at university, she still wasn’t able to understand native speakers or movies.
Later in the day, I had dinner with a Swedish friend, also a former teacher.
I asked him how he taught his students to understand better.
He told me.
Then I asked him how he taught himself to understand English.
And he gave me a completely different answer.
Hmmm…
It seems there are two sets of methods.
There are the methods that schools and teachers teach.
And there are the methods that fluent speakers use.
Which do you want to use?