I have a new student, a 14-year old boy called Alexey. He's studying at Advanced level, for the CAE exam. That's pretty impressive for a 14-year old, and more so as English is his third language after Russian and French (he's Russian but goes to a specialist French school).

So I have Alexey twice a week for individual lessons, an hour at a time. That's okay and makes a change from teaching groups. Plus I've never prepared anyone for the CAE exam before, so it's something new for me too.

But he's not the brightest spark. We were talking about suffixes, especially the suffix '-ish' you can add to make new words like 'thirtyish' or 'brownish'. I asked Alexey for some more examples. He thought for a minute before coming up with 'tunafish'.

So we went back to the beginning, and I explained the general concept in more detail. Once more I asked him for some more examples. This time he came up with 'tunafishish'...