Zachary Backes - TP 2

On Thursday Talal and I met again, and it felt a lot more studious this time around. We commandeered an empty class room and he had questions for me before we even sat down. I never realized some of the simplest concepts are the hardest to break the language barrier. He was having an issue figuring out when to use "it", "it's", and "It is". When I asked him to clarify he said knew that "it" was a pronoun but was having trouble creating sentences correctly. "Why it is wrong?", "Where it's going?", "What it doing?" were all phrases he knew sounded wrong but couldn't figure out how to fix them.

We started by figuring out how much he knew about the correct usage of the term and moving from there. He understood "it" as a pronoun but not much outside of that. I told him that "it" is a pronoun for almost everything that is not considered a person. Which inevitably lead to a conversation trying to define what constituted a "person" in our culture. That was fun bit of cultural introspection...(Massive multi-billion dollar corporations; legally people. Unborn fetuses, homosexuals, and for a good part of our history Women and anyone with to dark a skin tone; legally not people.) He actually talked pretty candidly about his own beliefs and that of the people from where he grew up. Most of his generation, he said, are pretty open-minded on most things but there are still very strong religious influences in certain areas of society.

Once we had established person-hood as a concept we started talking about when to use "it". I told him while English is mostly gender neutral when referring to a person he should always use "He" and "She", and how calling someone an "it" was like taking away their person-hood and a sign of disrespect. We even touched on Personification a bit when he asked why he had heard an American friend of his roommate refer to his car as "She". The hardest part was explaining "it" when explaining an idea of something. "Man, it is cold out." was a phrase he got from his text book and wrote out for me. He couldn't figure out what what "it" was referring to. My first thought was Oh, "it" is just talking about the weather, but then I thought on it. I told him while in this case "it" is most likely meaning the state of the weather the term can also be used when talking about a situation or specific circumstances. Like in the common greeting "How is it going?" or as I told Talal he is more likely to hear "How's it going?". This took us a good bit to work through, but he picked up on it a lot faster than my crappy examples and explanations should have allowed.

We spent the rest of our time going over the use of the term in past (was), future (will be), and when paired with "is". I wanted to go over the possessive "its" as well but we ran out of time so I will have something prepared for him next time we meet. It amazed me how long we spent on such a simple concept (philosophical tangents not withstanding). Coming from a gendered language like Arabic or Spanish seemed to make the neutral gender concepts a little trickier. But I'm curious if any one has come across an issue like this with their partners and what you guys did to get around it.