Hi, everybody,
I was just one day in Eilenburg to teach a class consisting of only women. It was also very funny, I enjoyed the day. We introduced ourselves, spoke about own interests, likes and dislikes, origin, some countries, cities. I repeated time expressions, days of the week, months, seasons and explained interesting connections between these words and what we used to associate with them as we, not only in English, but also in German, Swedish, Spanish, French etc. began using them. Just for anyone who is interested, I will expose it here briefly:
Monday refers to the goddess Moon, the same as Montag in German and lundi in French (lune = moon).
Tuesday refers to the God Tiu, similarly to Swedish tisdag and corresponding to French mardi. Roman Mars = Germanic Tiu or Tyr, in this sense Tiu corresponds to the French word Dieu/dieu = god that we find in adieu meaning good-bye.
Wednesday refers to the chief god Woden or Odinn, like in Swedish onsdag, compared with the Roman Mercurius, that is why French uses mercredi.
Thursday refers to the god of thunder, Thor or Donar, German Donnerstag the equivalent of the Roman god Jupiter, Jovis, French, e.g. jeudi.
Friday refers to the goddess of love, beauty and fertility Fre(y)ja, thus Freitag, equivalent of the Roman goddess Venus that we find in French as vendredi too.
Saturday refers to the god of agriculture and harvest Saturnus. Saturnus reminds us of Saat (= seed) in German. And last but not least, Sunday means worshipping the Sun as a pagan god. Actually, I do this to understand better both English and German and perhaps if someone in the class is interested in other languages, this would be a useful help.
As usual, we did grammar exercises: the regular verbs in the simple present form for habitual activities, the use of the auxiliary verb “to do”, interrogative and negative sentences. The verb “to like”, the use and position of frequency adverbs. I think this should be always be repeated in progressively more complex texts. Spelling vs. pronunciation: typical English sounds: th (voiced and voiceless), r-sounds (rhotic vs. non-rhotic English), no Ü- sound in English, the same as ö-sound (there is a similar one like in purse but it is not the same in my opinion): so I explained this too:
ü-German sounds in English often convert into [i] or [i:]-sounds in English. The result is plausible:
fühlen = feel, grün = green; Füße = feet (t like in the pair: iss and eat)
küssen = kiss, Brücke = bridge (dg like in Hecke and hedge, I like to work with rhyming elements), Mühle = mill, füllen = fill, Sünde = sin.
We read and wrote a lot of useful sentences referring to hobbies, leisure, sport etc.
Regards,
Roberto