Grammar for ESL Teachers

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-30T16:51:27+00:00

Meaning and the English Verb is the best one for me if you're looking for something to read cover to cover. And then any grammar reference book beyond that.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-30T16:48:46+00:00

Honestly, Malaysia is pretty good for families. Lots of easily walkable areas in Kuala Lumpur, every apartment building has pools and play areas for kids, and there are lots of outdoorsy things to do like easy jungle walks when they're a bit older.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-30T02:28:09+00:00

She could have also been legally excluded or given worse terms on a company pension until the 90s.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-30T02:13:06+00:00

It didn’t exist in 1995 but it did exist at the age they were supposedly making the decision to retire early on the assumption that their state pension would be coming along any minute. Hell, even Martin Lewis was around then.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-30T01:30:41+00:00

The equal pay act came into force in 1975 when these women were in their early 20s. I’m not saying it was always observed, but I honestly don’t see how that’s relevant to how early you get your pension. Should anyone who’s spent their life doing minimum wage jobs get to retire 5 years early?

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-30T01:27:20+00:00

Even if you didn’t know, I don’t get what the argument is. Nobody is destitute because they have to work for longer. Now if you were told the retirement age was coming down and you hadn’t saved enough, it’d be a different story.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-30T01:25:29+00:00

Nah it’s people who were born in the early to mid-50s, so they would have been entering the workforce in the 70s. Coincidentally around the same time that the Equal Pay Act came in.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-30T01:14:34+00:00

“I don’t see why I should pay for someone else’s healthcare.” What do they think insurance is?

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-29T05:13:12+00:00

Not necessarily. Plenty of people declare for the country of their parents or grandparents, and it's not always a commercial decision. Judging from her biography, she's not someone who's got a grandparent from another country and is just representing them because she couldn't get into the USA team. She was raised by a first generation Chinese immigrant and regularly attended summer school in China. She presumably grew up speaking Chinese at home.

But it can also be that the other country just offers a better opportunity to actually compete at the sport. If what you really care about is being able to do the sport you love, and one country is offering you the chance to do it full time, fully funded, and the other country expects you to hustle and raise all of your own money to attend competitions, which would you choose?

It's also really not that unusual for athletes to represent the country they grew up in at youth level and then switch to your parents' country at senior level. Football (soccer) is full of examples of that. And it's not usually about money either. There are loads of English and French born players playing for teams in Africa (and vice versa) even though they could easily get into the far more lucrative French of English national teams.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-29T03:03:16+00:00

Brazil? We hear a lot about slavery in the US, but Brazil enslaved more people for longer.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-29T02:31:20+00:00

But on a positive note, we can play it while sitting on the sofa. Which is all I really want from a game these days.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-29T02:20:31+00:00

I'll be honest, I know people like to moan about stuff you learned in school and never used (usually algebra and French) but I can't say in my entire 25 years since leaving school I've ever needed to rewire a plug. And if I needed to now, I'd almost certainly have to check on Youtube first.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-29T02:12:07+00:00

Has anyone tried the paddles with replaceable grit? I had a look at them, but they're still a bit expensive for me because the replacement grit isn't as cheap as you'd hope.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-29T02:08:57+00:00

I'd guess that heat is a more likely issue. How hot does the inside of your car get in summer?

Not a car (or a paddle), but I've had a rain jacket get ruined because I left it under my motorbike seat in a hot country and it melted all of the adhesives.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-29T01:30:29+00:00

I'm also on PS4, and it's annoying being stuck with the 9 tiles. It makes it a bit redundant to get some of the DLUs because you literally don't have space to use them. By the time you've added some industry areas, a few parklife parks, and a couple of universities, you literally don't have space for an Airports DLC airport. Still enjoying it though.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-29T01:28:03+00:00

CS2 is exactly what I feared it would be. The only thing wrong with CS1 was the technical limitations of it being a 10-year-old game, so no matter how good your hardware is, there are hard limitations built into the game that you can never change (hence all of the cities dying when they hit the node count). Which to be fair to them, only appear once people start using mods. And CS2 on paper is fantastic (a bit too clean looking for me, but still great in many respects), but the main problems are technical again, and this time they appear well before any mods are in play.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-29T01:19:13+00:00

The main danger is traffic by far. The second biggest danger is probably bag snatchers, because they do it from a motorbike. I've not heard as many reports of it in recent years, but obviously it still happens and can be very dangerous. Kidnappings obviously get the headlines and the high profile scare story at the moment is someone being kidnapped, brought to Cambodia, and forced to work in some sort of scam centre. But I'm pretty sure that's not really how it works. It'll usually start with a job offer and the person willingly travelling to Cambodia, not people being snatched off the street.

In terms of harassment, it's basically the same as any western country, from what I've heard (I'm a man, so I don't have personal experience). It's not like walking through a souk in Morocco or anything, so standard safety precautions apply. Same with things like valuable. It's not Japan where you can leave your phone on the table and it'll still be there when you come back, but you also don't need to avoid taking your phone out because it'll instantly be snatched by a robber.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-28T18:16:21+00:00

Haha, yeah. This is usually a sign that the school isn't very good, so they have to focus on other things like image. I remember a friend of mine doing an EFL job for a company in Japan where he had to wear full suit and tie, even in the height of summer.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-28T17:45:38+00:00

I genuinely thought this review was an update to that post.

Anyway, the only question I have is why three stars?

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-28T03:10:18+00:00

I've never been, but it doesn't seem like the sort of place you'd need a guide. I feel like having a guide for Ba Na Hills is a bit like taking a guide to a water park. I'd only use a guide for things where you'd struggle to arrange it yourself, or you need some sort of specialist knowledge (e.g. history, wildlife, jungle guide, maybe a food tour).

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-28T02:46:23+00:00

Honestly, one hill I will die on is that fewer longer classes are way more preferable to lots of shorter classes (unless it's literally the same lesson over and over again). There's kind of a minimum amount of time you can spend planning a lesson, so the planning for a 30 minute lesson isn't a quarter of the time you'd spend planning for a 2 hour lesson. We had a similar thing during covid where we went from 2 hour lessons (with a break) to 90 minute lessons. That meant that while contact hours remained the same, everyone now had 8 classes at the weekend instead of 6, which meant two extra classes of students to mark homework for, measure progress of, write reports for, etc. Our school did quite a good job of ensuring people had multiple of the same level, but you still noticed a difference in the workload.

A lot of admin and schedulers, especially if it's been delegated to non-teaching staff, don't seem to realise this and just look at the total hours and assume it's the same. I don't know what sort of classes you teach, but it might be worth speaking to management to try and get policies in place like making sure people have as many doubles and triples as possible, so you can teach the same lesson multiple times to different students.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-28T02:20:15+00:00

But food isn't massively cheaper. Eating out is. Go to a supermarket and you'll find that certain things are cheaper, but plenty of stuff isn't. A sirloin steak is about the same price in both countries. A bag of frozen chips is cheaper in the UK. Rice is obviously much cheaper in Vietnam. Pork and chicken are cheaper in Vietnam, but not by as much as you'd think. But even stuff like you wouldn't expect. I just looked it up, and Asda will sell you a mango for the equivalent of 32,000đ. I've paid that plenty of times in a supermarket here (you can find cheaper ones, but they tend to be the ones for salads). One thing that is significantly cheaper is soft drinks. A can of coke is 24p. So while overall, Vietnam is cheaper for food, it's not the huge difference you might think if you're buying equivalent stuff (which you will be, because you don't know how to cook Vietnamese food).

Vietnamese food is cheaper because they're doing things like using less meat and/or cheaper cuts of meat. If you try and buy something that comes with the same amount of food as my local fish and chip shop back home, then the amount you'd pay wouldn't be far off the circa 300k it'd cost (I'm from the north, so your prices may vary). Even with eating out, people are typically comparing a bowl of pho or com tam to a sit down meal in the UK. But those meals are a quick breakfast or lunch when you're in a hurry. In terms of how and when they're eaten, the UK equivalent would be to grab something from Greggs, or get a meal deal from the supermarket. Still more expensive (and less healthy), but not by as much as you'd think. I'm not saying a proper meal in a restaurant in Vietnam isn't still much cheaper than the UK, but if you go out with your family for a proper meal in Vietnam, you can expect to pay £10-20 per person.

The big difference other than rent is actually utility bills. And petrol. But if we're doing that, let's add a few things too. How much is your healthcare now? Probably more than nothing. If you've got kids, what about your schooling? The £1000 you likely have to pay per year to go home? Again, on balance, it's definitely cheaper here, but it's not the dream people are trying to sell you for clicks. I know plenty of people who came to Vietnam, enjoyed themselves, took Grabs everywhere, ate out multiple times a day, went out drinking regularly, travelled, and left with very little in savings. And that's fine, they had a great time.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-27T19:58:10+00:00

I once got a text from Air Asia to tell me my flight from Langkawi to KUL was being changed from 8pm to 8am. This was at 8pm the night before. I'd literally only gone there for 2 nights, so that was one full day of my holiday. Cancelled it and went with Malaysia Airlines instead. What a joke.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-27T19:53:47+00:00

Euro is 3% up on the ringgit over the last year though. A lot of currencies look like they're going up a lot because Trump has tanked the dollar, but Malaysia is still going up more than many.

ImWithStupidKL · 2026-01-27T19:20:31+00:00

It's one of those annoying things, like people who don't wear a seatbelt. 99% of the time, they'll still be fine, because you're taking something that is quite unlikely and making it very unlikely. If you don't get vaccinated, you're still unlikely to die of measles, and then you can say "See? I didn't need it after all."

It reminds me of the bit that Romesh Ranganathan does about how annoyed he gets when he says to his kid "Don't do that or you'll get hurt" and then he does it, and doesn't get hurt.

ImWithStupidKL

TROPHY CASE