This week at Inkreadable, dear reader, while not as difficult as the previous week, was a challenge. I had finished up with Fiol and we have agreed to keep in contact which is quite nice. She will be coming to Amsterdam in October to do a masterclass in styling and color, so I will probably head to her location to see her for a bit. She will be in a town called Soest and as I am quite excited to see different places in the Netherlands, I’m quite willing to take the train out. I was also heartened to hear that she is going to continue her English studies in Germany. Her concern is that she cannot get an immersive experience. There aren’t that many native speakers living in Germany apparently. Her intensive was difficult because it was long and her level is pretty low. The intensive that I started just after she finished is with a woman called Maxime and she is a whole different animal.
Maxime in contrast to Fiol is a quite high level of English. Her goal is to become more fluent and make sure that she does not sound terrible in English. What’s interesting about her is that it’s a story that I’ve heard a million times before. Most of my Dutch feel confident in English, which is good enough for vacation and social English situations. The majority feel, however, that their business English is not quite up to snuff and that’s where I come in. Or rather teachers like me. We are able to give that final polish in terms of idiomatic speech and fluency. In this case, it’s all of that but also a little bit of interview and job prep as she is looking for work. We have been working on mostly discussion and critical thinking using articles that she is interested in and that I had in my arsenal. The prep hasn’t been terrible for the lessons though I have been making questions from the articles that we’ve read to understand and assess her comprehension. I have a feeling that I’m going to be seeing more of her even after this intensive is over. I’m just not sure what that will look like. She’s a challenge because I need to really be on my toes with her questions. I have to be ready for anything from basic grammar to thought provoking challenging language questions. It’s a pity that our last class of the intensive is today. I have enjoyed myself over the last few days. In other TEC news, a couple of weeks ago I was told that a student that I had during the pandemic in 2021 to continue with me, but I have not yet heard anything else from them about that student. Her name is Isabel and of course, I did tell TEC that I would be happy to take her on.
In my private client world, ShinWei has decided to continue for another 10 hours and another student contacted me and would like to continue as well. She is a former client that I had a few years ago go with the English Center and I was quite surprised to hear from her. She wants pronunciation help and as she is Greek, it should be quite easy this time. She’s very similar to both Eleni and Galini so I will probably just use some similar lessons.
It’s been a good week in terms of writing as well, and while I’m not currently creating, I’m quite pleased with this second round of rereading and actually plotting the novel. I’m finding that it’s easier to isolate things that I want to do in the next book with these characters. I’m only about halfway through so it’ll be another few Thursdays and Saturday sessions before I’m done. But I think by the end of August I should be back to creative mode and then I might have a clearer picture of both where the novel is going and ideas for a second one.
In other( kind of related) news, this coming weekend several of the writers and I are headed to the Deventer book market. It is the largest book market in Europe and as you know, any chance that I can get to get out of Amsterdam even for the day and have a little bit of fun, is just icing on the cake.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there’s more to come.
Inkreadable 