Richard Belcher

I like to make new friends of some of my students. I have had students that have went on to become life long friends of mine. Secondly, I love to help my students achieve their goals with the language. I had a set of twins Katya and Rodrigo Jr. that needed to learn English well enough to start in the 10th grade in a US school. I got them up to speed and they passed their entrance exam and were able to enter in the grade that reflected their age. Now, they have finished high school and are entering university and stay in touch with me and I feel that I had a small part in this.

1985, while living abroad in Norway.

Many of my students wish relocate out of South America and to migrate to the USA, Canada, New Zealand or Australia.

I think that the European languages are all pretty close in their difficulty in studies for each language compared to Cantonese, Mandarin or Japanese. A typical European language book case will fill half the case while Mandarin will fill two and a half bookcases with the books needed to study the language.

American English has fifty different states and each state reflects a different accent. American English is very sloppy with hundreds of modern idioms that reflect the specific location that one is in. I also find that in the USA, different ethnic and cultural groups speak differently than even the other people that might be their neighbors. To be honest there is no one place that has perfect English these days as modern idioms and the advent of television that connects the entire planet feeds everybody watching modern California English and many people in Britain or Canada now speak words and idioms that come from Southern California. This includes Afro American slang and Chicano slang for the state's Latio population which all gets displayed at the cinema in films shot in Hollywood. And, then there is the internet which commingles multiple English speakers throughout the globe with bad grammar and silly punctuation that is sent back and forth with text messages via the internet.

Hollywood or New York City. American television and cinema has brought this about.

Having lazy students that do not pay attention and disrupt the rest of the students and me finding a way to please both the lazy student and the other students that do all the work, pay attention and take the class serious.

A student that pays attention and does all the homework and will ask questions before, during and after the class so as to fix their issues and help me help them.

This depends on where you are coming from. For South Americans some letters of the alphabet are very difficult such as the L or R. While, Asians have other problems that they find with different letters of the alphabet and verb placement etc.

Take a break from the hard memorization stuff and go watch an American television show or movie with sub titles and have a little fun with the language and realize just how much you have learned and not stress the other harder memorization problems.