Brian_TP3

Late last week I was able to meet up with Amr for a tutoring session before his grammar test. For most of the hour we worked on the past tense of regular and irregular verbs. His homework was to make a list with 10 of each, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he was much better at determining the past tense of regular verbs. What was interesting to me was that we both tended to come up with much more irregular verbs than regular ones. This underscored a point that we've talked about in class and I've noticed during my tutoring sessions: that rules almost never apply universally in the English language. When asked about situations like this, I've been tempted to try to explain the details of the grammar, but that invariably leads to more confusion. Asking for an example is, of course, a much better option.