hey all,
My 3rd year English teacher asked me to teach "It is ____ for me to ____" to the students, or at least to introduce them to this sentence. For example, "It is hard for me to read Japanese."
They do not know the gerund form of verbs yet, so I cannot give them a sentence like "Reading Japanese is hard for me," and while "To read Japanese is hard for me" is kinda OK and understandable, it still sounds really strange and I can't imagine an adult mentally-OK native speaker saying it.
So basically, I just use the example sentence above, and then contrast it with "It is easy for you all to read Japanese," then I make a few more examples like "It is important for me to study language," after which I talk about my linguistics major, and how many languages I've studied. Another good one is "It is fun for me to travel," because then I can also use "I have been to...," which is a sentence that was just introduced last week. I usually try to have some of the students make up their own sentences to exercise some creativity, but these sometimes don't go over too well. I've made two different worksheets for this sentence: one which is just writing, and another which is speaking/listening, plus a little writing.
So, trying to teach this sentence has been interesting and challenging, especially when I'm not supposed to explain anything in Japanese, but then, before I listened to the Japanese teacher's presentation of it, I didn't know how to say it in Japanese anyway.
Cheers,
