My first English tutor When I was in a middle school, I had only one 40 minutes lesson of English every week. My parents thought it isn’t enough and hired a private tutor. Let’s call him Boris. Boris was a plump, middle aged guy. He had dark hair, think eyebrows which almost formed a unibrow. He locked like a someone from Georgia, Armenia, or Azerbaijan, although, he didn’t have an accent. He wore a brown suit, always the same. To split the cost, my mom arranged it for two people, me and my school classmate, Eugene. The tutor would come to my parent’s apartment and stay for 1.5 hours. After the lesson, Eugene and I played some kind of soccer with a small ball. I can believe my parents allowed it. We could easily crack windows or break TV. Our neighbours below us were apparently were patient people. They had never complained about the noise. I can't remember anything he taught us except one thing: how to say current time. 3:30 am would become “half past three O’clock”, and 3:45 would become “quoter to four O’clock”. I’m yet to find a person in North America who speaks like this. First part: http://www.italki.com/entry/383534

My first English teacher I’ve started learning English when I was at 5th grade of school (1st year of a middle school in North America). It was 15 years ago. My school was in suburbs of Moscow, Russia. My first English teacher was an old lady, probably around my grandma age. Her face was wrinkled, her hair was all gray. She was often forgetting what we did in the last lesson. Sometimes she would digress and tell stories about her cat, son and grandson. We addressed to her as Olga Borisovna. Or maybe not,–I don’t remember her actual name,–but let’s keep it this way. Olga was her first name and Borisovna was her patronymic (look it up). We started with an alphabet. Nobody in a class knew how to correctly pronounce all letters by the time of the first lesson. Especially "w", I used to call it double-v. I knew how to count up to 12. "Van", "too", "free", "four", "five", "see-x", ..., "tvelve". My English vocabulary consisted of 25 words, 30 at most. Olga Borisovna learned English in USSR and probably hadn’t lived or studied in English speaking countries. She taught us that in English speaking countries people say "How do you do?" as a greeting. "They don’t want hear an honest answer, you have to reply with the same question", she said. It seemed strange to me. Why would people ask something if they don’t care about the answer? I believed her nonetheless. "This is a table" "This is a chair" I learned "this", "table" and "char but "is" and "a" kept me puzzled. Why don’t they just say "This table" like we do in Russian? What’s the point of "a" and "is"? "We start with present simple tense. There are 9 tenses in English. Actually, there are more, 16, I think, but people don’t use them any more." said Olga Borisovna. It didn’t make any sense. How can it be anything but 3–past, present, future? 1 lesson of 40 minutes every week, 1 year had passed by. On my first English lesson of 6th grade I didn’t remember anything I had learned before.

Population: None I was listening radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There is a quote from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: "It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination." The question is arised in my mind: "Why number of inhabitad worlds can't be infinite?" (We can discuss about it and you can correct my spelling.)

Are these sentences correct? "You can call me from 13:00 to 21:00 in the next week." "I won't be busy in the next week."Amy, thank you! I meant "I won't be busy next week".

"It's been" and "It was" What the differences between these 2 statements? It's been a long journey. It was a long journey.

"don't have" or "have no" What the difference between "I don't have an ink in my printer." "I have no ink in my printer" and "I don't have an idea" "I have no idea" ? Which of them is a preferable?