062Y55A00 27/03 How to say Good or Bad

After watching the movie about Idi Amin last week it seems that quite a few of you didn't actually go and do as I asked and look him up on the 'Net. It also seems that some people didn't read last week's article either!

Guys, although it might seem that we cover a lot of ground [talk about a lot of things] in class, this is also a class where there is no set text-book. These articles ARE your text book. I'll often say things we didn't cover in class, or make some things clearer, or explain how things link up, only in these articles. Also, as I said at the beginning, I don't think of you as children. I am not going to test you to see if you did your homework as if you were middle-school kids. Nor punish you if you don't. I can't give you a sense of responsibility, its something you have to develop for yourselves.

One and a half hours per week is not very much time for you to gain enough knowledge to be able to discuss things like adults. While you may (and, I hope, do) gain extra knowledge from your classmates, the person who gives you the most knowledge is yourself. The name of the class is "Class Discussion". We can't discuss things if you don't arm yourself with knowledge about them.

Idi Amin was a very colourful and controversial character in world history. Which is every bit as much YOUR history as Chinese history is. There has been heaps written about him, lots of images, songs, cartoons, funny stories, anecdotes. It really was disappointing that some people didn't even know if he was a bad guy or a good guy!

This is your world. In a few years time you are going to be the ones running it, managing it and taking responsibility for it. You simply have to find out a little more about it.

Now, although this is not an Oral English class at all, as a native English speaker there is help I can give you with the spoken language. Until now I haven't paid too much attention to the way the language is spoken, but have concentrated instead on getting you to start talking with a little more confidence.But to-day, in line with some of the other classes, we started to look at the way the spoken language is different from the written language. Mostly today we spoke about ways to express the simple concept of how to greet our peers and how to express approval or disapproval.

Because we started doing language work in other classes as well, you might like to look through the vocabulary lists of the other classes this week. I don't teach exactly the same class to different groups so you will find different things on different class vocabulary lists.

What we covered was different ways to say a thing is good or nice. These included
It rocks,
cool,
awesome,
yummy (usually only food, but sometimes a really wicked -looking person!)
mad,
wicked
sick.

these last three words all actually have different meanings to "good" if you look them up in your dictionaries but, in oral speech, they have the completely opposite meaning.

The reason this is possible without confusion is because the meaning of English words is often contained as much in the way we say them as in the words themselves. Thus o.k. can mean good, bad, or show indifference, all depending on the way we say it.

Words to express that we didn't like something include calling things
crap,
bullshit,
yucky
and not-good.

Putting so or totally in front of something has come to replace the word very and is used for emphasis. So something can be not good, so not-good or totally not-good on a descending scale. If something is described as totally cool, or totally rubbish, or totally crap and we agree we just say Totally!

We also talked about greeting people and how the text-book greetings, which are fine for introducing us to the language, are not actually part of informal or every day English. In fact the most common greeting is the simplest of all: Hey. We say it to someone, they say it back and that's that.

The main problem with the Hello,howareyou - I'mfine thanksandyou? - I'mfine. model is that it was a greeting learned when we didn't know much English and were not looking to start a conversation but wanted to appear polite. As a conversational starter, however, it is a dead end. It leads nowhere. Which is fine when that's the only English you know!

More appropriate are the common greetings which ask not how a person's health is ( like asking whether a person has eaten or not is hardly a burning issue) but what is happening in their life. Or whether or not they want to do something with us, or have time for a chat. These are all covered by
Wassup
How r thingz with you? (Usually said with no pauses as if its one word)
Wotcha been upta?
What's happening?

we have the option of just replying Nuthen much or same ole same ole, or of actually answering by replying that we are on our way to class, or thinking about going to have something to eat, or planning on going downtown etc. This allows not just a conversation, but the opportunity to hang out [do things together]

Remember, language is just a tool for communication and so we should learn to use that tool properly. Communicate!