I have been teaching beginner's level English in English at my school. The classes are very simple and straight forward, except that it is taught all in English, mostly orally, and no Japanese allowed in class, so some of my young students receive quite a shock and sometimes stumble on some simple exercises.
In the workbook, there was a page of exercises where the students had to choose the correct word from given choices to complete the sentence. One student who was quite good at English made mistake on this question:
'Yesterday' is a ( wrong, long, young ) word.
The word 'yesterday' was one of the long words that appeared in their text book so far, so the correct choice was 'long'.
The student first chose 'wrong'. I put a red underline on the incorrect choice, and let him try again. I thought that his mistake was due to misunderstanding of the spelling and the pronunciation.
He came back to me with his workbook. He chose 'young'.
Wrong again. I wondered why this bright boy would make this easy mistake. I gave the workbook back to him and told him that the last one left was the correct choice.
"Really? I couldn't really get this question. I had to really think for this one. I mean, 'Yesterday' isn't that long, is it? So that one was out of the choice. There are much longer words, I know longer ones. Then, I thought, OK, if I compare myself of yesterday and myself of today, I am one day older than yesterday. So everything yesterday is one day younger than everything today. That's why I chose 'young'."
He had a point.
He thought about the event that the meaning of the word carries.
Yes, 'yesterday' could be a long and young word.
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