Draw what you see Hi, guys! I came upon this sentence: Oh, I know the old saw advising you not to worry about drawing what you see, but seeing what you draw. What does it mean? I tried to do what my teacher recommended me to do: I looked for the subject and the verb. I found the first subject-verb pair: "I know" ("I" - the subject, "know" - the verb), and we have something which follows the verb "know". I guess it's a that-clause. And I guess "what you see" and "what you draw" are also subordinate clauses. But I failed to put the jigsaw together (analyze that sentence further)... Does anybody have any ideas about what the subject and the verb in the subordinate clauses are? What is the grammar structure of the sentence?

You need to study English hard No learner of English can expect good results without hard work. A learner of English cannot expect good results without hard work. The learner of English cannot expect good results without hard work. Learners of English cannot expect good results without hard work. Which one is better to use to express the idea “you need to study English hard, otherwise you cannot expect anything”? Thanks in advance

Sweet Life - Сладкая жизнь (Part 2) Part 1 is here: https://www.italki.com/notebook/4754863/entry/861468 "Sweet Life" (Сладкая жизнь) is a popular Russian TV series about young and rich people living in Moscow. They live lives full of fun and joy. The main characters do nothing but having a good time. This is what we call "sweet life." Most of ordinary people can only dream about such a life (in Russian and in any other country). So as you can see the series is controversial, but please let's not discuss its controversies here! Let's concentrate on language aspects only. It represents the modern Russian language very well, and will be very useful of learners of Russian as a supplementary material. It's available online on the official website tnt-online.ru, and also on many other websites (google will help you) I will post short fragments of about 5 minutes in separate threads. Don't hesitate to add your versions of translation with an explanation why you think your version is better than mine. Please don't spoil this discussion by posting comments that are not related to the topic, or have the only aim to express your own subjective opinion about the series no matter whether they are positive or negative. Let's make this thread useful for all italki users who are interested in studying English and Russian languages! Let's do it together!

Sweet Life - Сладкая жизнь (part 1) Dear fellow students! This post will be useful for both learners of the English and Russian languages. Just like many other language learners, I really enjoy watching series in English, which is my target language. I think it's a good listening practice, and it also helps me to expand vocabulary and improve grammar. When watching English movies and reading English books, we practice our language skills in this way: From our Target Language (English) to our Native Language (in my case, Russian) But it seems we also practice our language skills in the opposite direction: From our Native language (in my case, Russian) to our Target language (English) Why is it important to practice it in both directions? Because there are so many situations when you want to say (or write) something in English, and it seems that you have enough vocabulary, but you just can't do it. You know how to express some idea in you native language (Russian), and you may translate it into English word by word, but it won't be enough. I wouldn't sound natural. There so many wonderful Russian books, songs, movies which can be used to practice language skills this way. Moreover, they are wonderful by themselves, but let’s leave books written by Pushkin and Tolstoy to advanced learners. I've got an idea to use some modern Russian series to practice translating from Russian to English. Daily conversations for such series will be more interesting and useful learners. I've chosen this one: "Sweet Life" (Сладкая жизнь). There is no translation into English yet, so we are going to be pioneers :) Part 2 is here: https://www.italki.com/entry/861469

Why I chose to be a school teacher Hello! My name is Marina, and today I going to tell you about why I chose teaching profession. I graduated from a pedagogical university, where I majored in the pedagogics for elementary/primary school students (actually, for kids). And now I work for a school as a teacher. I work with kids of 8 to 9 years old. I love children very much though I don't have my own kids for now. I love my work because as an old professor of mine said, when you are teaching somebody something, you are at that very moment being taught yourself (it may sound clumsy in English, but the professor said these words in Russian, and I just translated them into English, one by one, word after word.) As my professors told me, I was one of the most strong students in my group, passing all exams on an A grade. (Actually, it wasn't "A" grade; in my country there are following grades: Excellent (or a "Five" grade), Good (or a "Four" grade), Satisfactorily (or a "Three" grade), and Unsatisfactorily (or a "Two" grade), where "Five" is the highest and "Two" is the lowest; When a student gets Two, then he/she has to take this exam again; So strictly speaking I was a strait Five student - is it correct to say?) Unfortunately, teaching is very ill-paid work, and working as a teacher one cannot aford to buy anything but food and other necessities. A friend of mine, Veronica is now employed by airlines company and she works on international airlines. She makes very good money, and she has a very good compensation package including 60-day paid vacation which she spend travelling. I a bit envy her in a good sense of this word of course, because she is my friend. She speaks English and Chinese fluently, and she is very beautiful. She looks like those women from advertisement of airline tickets. She keeps telling me that if I also want to travel around the globe and learn about different cultures, then I should study foreign languages and then make an application for a job at some international airline company. I want to travel very much, but at the same time I don't want to give up my job and my dear little pupils. Our relation is not just like between a teacher and a pupil. We are friends actually :) I love them, and they love me. I don't want to give up teaching. I live with my parents. They are old and in need of my help. I cook, wash, do domestic chores and go shopping in order to buy foodstuffs and other necessities. That is another reason why I cannot work as a flight attendant.

My first teacher of English I'm going to tell you about my first teacher of English. He taught me all I know about English. I have no enough words to express all my gratitude to him. Maybe I'm a terrible speaker of English due to the fact that I haven't had any real oral practice, but at least I'm able to express my thoughts and ideas clearly enough for other people to understand what I mean. (Am I?) He always kept repeating that the grammar is the most important part of studying a foreign language. I remember him asking the question "who is doing what to whom?" which he kept asking over and over again. I was a teenager then, I didn't want to study instead I just wanted to party, just like in that song :) But he managed to motivate me somehow and made me interested in studying all those annoying grammar rules. Who was he? It was my uncle Gosha. He was a tall handsome nice-looking man, and it seems that I was in love with him, but he was my uncle and so there couldn't have been anything between us... His lessons were so interesting and charming! We used to listen to and sing English songs together, watched comedy and romantic movies. One day I asked him persistently to watch Sex and the City (my favourite soap opera!) He couldn't decline the request of his niece, though he felt embarrassed. I teased him a bit :) But after he had watched the whole season 1, he said now it's his favourite soap opera too, can you believe it? :) We discussed different spicy expressions from that movie. Happily, my mom was far away during our classes and didn't hear what things we were talking about. (Even if she had heard it, she wouldn't have understood them because she doesn't speak English; she was taught German at school.) He wasn't even a pro teacher, but he knew English perfectly. He had never been to America or something though. At the very beginning of his career path he was a lawyer, and I believe that he might have become a brilliant attorney or something, but good jobs are distributed so unfairly here, especially in legal profession. I myself dreamed to become a lawyer. I wanted to protect innocent people in court and help the weak to protect their legal rights. He used to tell me different stories from his life, and gave me some food for mind. I came to the conclusion that gaining a legal profession in my country is a bad idea. I so I decided to go to study at pedagogical institute :) Now I work as an elementary school teacher, and I feel happy about it.

Hello there! Hello! My name is Marina, and I'm here to find new friends and fellows. I studied English at university, but at the time I wasn't actually interested in English and so instead of studying English diligently I was fooling around during four semesters. It was a great opportunity for me to polish my English, but I lost it. It's pity. I'm so sorry that I didn't use this wonderful opportunity to study English for free. I majored in the pedagogics for elementary/primary school students (actually, for kids). And now I work for a school as a teacher. I work with kids of 8 to 9 years old. I love children very much though I don't have my own kids for now. I love my work because as an old professor of mine said, when you are teaching somebody something, you are at that very moment being taught yourself (it may sound clumsy in English, but the professor said these words in Russian, and I just translated them into English, one by one, word after word.) I live with my parents. They are old and in need of my help. I cook, wash, do domestic chores and go shopping in order to buy foodstuffs and other necessities. I don't have much time because I've got to work from dawn till dusk from Monday to Friday. Tomorrow is Sunday, and I've got to work on Sunday too due to the command of the principal (or the head teacher?) to accompany a group of kids going to the museum. I had already been to that museum for a thousand times, and I'm not interested in going there once more time. But the thing is that the colleague of mine who had been supposed to go there took a sick leave and said that she would not go there. Now she simply doesn't answer phone call neither mine nor the principal's When I have a free time, I spend it watching soup operas and walking in the forest. There is a pretty nice forest near my home, and I like to feed squirrels there. At the winter there are few squirrels there, but at summer there are twice as more squirrels as now. When I was a schoolgirl myself, I wanted to catch a squirrel and fetch her at home, but my daddy said that it is wrong to confine wild animals. "Wild animals have been supposed to live in the forest," he used to say. I cried when he forbade to do it, although now I think that he was 100% right. Now I myself teach my students not to try to catch wild animals and birds I would be very thankful if anybody would tell me the difference between "spare time" and "free time"? Is it okay to call kids of 8 years "students"? Thank you in advance