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I have one blissful hour a week of intelligent English conversation teaching. At the school I teach at Friday evenings I have one adult class with two people - a female doctor and a 50 year old sarariman who is full of life, runs marathons and participates in semi professional Japanese chess tournaments.

This is the lesson I look forward to the most as I am able to have a proper conversation beyond “What animal do you like?” and “Do you like Football?”

The salaryman brought in a piece of paper with similar sounding sentences on them and asked me to explain the difference in implication between them. The first one was “Please be my guest” and “I`ll give you a treat” The second one sounds like it`s more of a adult to a child sentence or even “I`ll give you a treat (Please touch my penis little boy)”

An interesting one was the difference between “I will be careful” and “It won`t happen again” I thought the “I will be careful” implies that I`ll try really hard not to do it again (but it might happen again) whereas “It won`t happen again” is more certain that it is definitely the last time that will ever happen.

The next one was slightly more bizarre “The law of the jungle” and “weak meat and strong food” I didn`t really understand the last one. I could see where it was coming from but if the meat is weak why is the food strong? There`s nothing about the predator. Shouldn`t it be the other way around? It was the first time I had ever heard of this phrase. Any ideas on the differences of any of these? The week before with no warning he brought in Shakespeare`s Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) and asked me to explain it. Nevertheless you can see why it is my most interesting lesson.