English lessons for beginners

English is the one language most adult beginners have already sat through, which makes it unlike starting Japanese or Arabic from nothing. People arrive convinced they know none of it, and then in the first twenty minutes produce a past tense they have not used since school, read a sign correctly, and recognise half of a short paragraph. The early lessons are largely archaeology: finding what is still there, which is usually more than the person expects, and sorting the half remembered rules into ones worth keeping and ones to ignore. There is normally a concrete reason too. English is rarely taken up out of curiosity. It is a job advertisement that asks for it, a move, a grandchild growing up abroad, or a customer who will only write in it, and a good tutor aims at that from the first lesson instead of working through a textbook. The first lesson is usually free and you need nothing prepared.