Gabe - TS #13

     For this lesson, we started by reviewing how to use in, at, and on in relation to time. This is something he had struggled with before but he's now starting to get the hang of it. I gave him a little quiz on this and he answered most of them correctly. We reviewed the wrong answer, which was a fill in the blank question in which for part of it he gave the answer "at the evening." He had confused this with "at night." We then talked a little about the (minimal) differences between "evening" and "night" and he seemed to understand them: evening and night are more or less synonymous, but to greet someone at night you say "good evening" and to bid someone goodbye you say "good night." The other difference is that you say "at night" but "in the evening," otherwise they are synonymous. We then went over how to use in, at, and on in relation to place. His biggest source of confusion was the use of "at" vs. "in" with regards to specific places. I thought the way I explained it made sense but he was still confused so I basically just said the same thing again, but a little more slowly, and for some reason this mostly worked. He then asked me if I could write out this rule because while he was starting to get it he just didn't quite get it yet. After this he seemed to finally understand. 

    The rest of the session was spent chatting about various things. Particularly, we talked a little about the way the letter "t" sounds like a "ch" in front of the letter "r" and how in turn, the letter "s" when in front of "tr" sounds like an "sh" in words such as "street," "chemistry," and "distract." This is something he had noticed himself and he pointed it out to me, although I forget which word it was that he pointed out. Later in the conversation, he said a word I didn't understand. After asking him to repeat it a couple of times, I realized he was saying "yesterday" but pronouncing it like "yeshcherday." I told him he should say it like "yes-ter-day" and he wanted to know why I wouldn't pronounce the "t" like a "ch" because it was in front of an "r." I explained that the letter "r" sometimes functions more like a vowel than a consonant, and that in this case it was vowel-like so the "t" doesn't change. I think for next lesson we will go into this topic more in-depth. Something I've noticed about Masoud over the course of these lessons is that he's very perceptive to some of the more subtle aspects of pronunciation. For example, he has noticed that the pronunciation of the letter "l" changes between words such as "lack" vs. "call" or "let" vs. "tell." This is something not even a lot of native speakers notice, and I didn't notice it until it was pointed out in the very first linguistics course I took, so I was thoroughly impressed that he picked up on it himself.

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