TS#15 – Sultan

Yesterday I met with Sultan during his lunch break in between CIES classes. We met at the Starbucks behind CIES, where I decided that we would work on prefixes. He had never heard of them before, but was very intrigued by the idea that words could be assembled from smaller parts of language, like Legos. Some of the prefixes that I introduced to him were: pre-, ante-, ex-, exo-, co-, fore-, homo-, un-, and the suffix –tion. We only worked on the suffix –tion because he was curious about its spelling and pronunciation, since he had trouble remembering the phonetics of the suffix. I explained to him that –tion is pronounced like the word “shun”. He was also puzzled as to why there were many prefixes that meant the same thing, such as pre-, ante-, and fore- all meaning “before”. Then an interesting thing happened, Sultan began trying to create his own words using prefixes, asking for example, if he could say the phrase: “I am now ex-job.” I corrected him by introducing him to the prefix un-, which means “without”, and told him that the correct phrase would be: “I am now unemployed.”