These, This, Other, Thing, Etc.

Responding to Comments:

Elise: Thanks for taking the effort to keep up on my blog. I am sure it takes quite a lot of work. If you miss just one day you have a lot of reading to do. Two weeks is quite a lot.

Annie: Ringo! It’s good to hear from you. I am glad you were able to stumble across my blog. Don’t worry, I won’t hate you for using my blog to get in contact with Alyse and George. If you have a chance tell me what you are up to: luke.storer@gmail.com (Hey! I just had a great idea! this blog could be a great way to announce my new email address… Just a min. Ringo, I will be right back to you…

ATTENTION ONE AND ALL!
Luke Storer has a new email address at: luke.storer@gmail.com eventually he would like to phase out his other email addresses and only use this one. He probably won’t do that for a while, but if you want to begin to use this email address feel free. Luke will still be checking all old email address. Thank you. That is all.

Sorry about that Ringo. It’s no problem that you were correcting my blog. I just want you to be aware that I do not claim to have a blog without errors. I very well may miss punctuation mispel words, and occasionally use grammar that ain’t too good. (laugh) Please don’t hold it against me. If I had more time, I could probably go through and make a number of corrections, but it just isn’t important enough to me. The most important thing is that people get to hear about what I am up to.

Dad: I’m glad the website helped you out.

Bethany: No I have not tried the stuff that is like grapefruit, but I have had a number of other fruit—and I like the majority of it quite well.

Official blog entry:

This weekend, I decided that I have been giving my students at the office plenty of opportunities to practice pronunciation and work on writing, but not much of a chance for actual conversations, so today I talked with one of my students and asked him If he had any pets. We had a little conversation there about pets, and then I had two other students ask each other questions about pets. and then two others and so on and so forth.

In the conversations that followed, I learned that some Lao people believe that if you feed a dog sugar it will be more violent, and one of my students believed that if you spit into sticky rice and feed it to your dog, it will obey you. (It has worked for his brother for years)

We started to talk about food, and I found that the Vietnamese enjoy eating dog and cat, but none of my students really did… wait, I think one of them did. And the Lao people make some food with cow dung. They flavor a sauce with the dung found in the small intestine of the cow, and it makes it taste bitter. I don’t think they use very much of it. But then Ter told me that I ate some the other day. I am guessing my face looked pretty funny at that point. I had a hard time believing I really ate cow dung uhg! (Luke makes a face of disgust)… no wonder I didn’t really like it. (laugh)

On a much more exciting note, all of my students at the office can now say the “th” sound. That was one of my big problems. I couldn’t explain it to a few of my students, and they just were not getting it, so I mostly ignored it, but tried to get them to say it right at least once a day. Today I noticed that a couple students (there is that ice cream song again playing down the street… but wait! I think they fixed something, because it is a whole song now… that’s cool… still annoying, but at least it’s a whole song.) where saying it almost correctly, so I tested them… I wrote
These
This
Those
That
Other
Thing
Theater
on the board, and I asked each person to say the words… they all succeeded in making some sort of “th” sound… I was so happy! They aren’t all perfect, but I can work with them and they will improve, because they can make the sound… before they couldn’t do it at all.

An interesting note about the “th” sound have you ever realized that we have two different sounds for it. One sound is in “this” and the other is in “theater”
The “th” in this has a sound to it, but the “th” in theater is just air coming out of your mouth. Your mouth is in the same position for both sounds.

And another thing I never thought about… have you noticed the difference between using “the other” and “another”? Correct the following sentences.

“There was a box full of ice cream sandwiches in the freezer. Al ate one and then he ate [another/the other].”

“Jake had two dogs. One was fat and lazy and [another/the other] was very hyper.”

Do you know why? I didn’t until today. The answer is in the articles. “The” is a definite article. If you say “the table” you are saying that there is only one in the room, or one that you are talking about. “A” is an indefinite article. If you say “a table” you are saying it is one of many tables. The same goes for other. If you say “the other” you are talking about two things and are saying that there is only one more thing. “Jake had two dogs. One was fat and lazy and THE OTHER was very hyper.” if you say “another” you are really saying “an other” and are talking about one of many things (at least three) “There was a box full of ice cream sandwiches in the freezer. Al ate one and then he ate another.”

You may thing this is all quite boring, but I thought it was fascinating.

-Luke