My first English teacher I’ve started learning English when I was at 5th grade of school (1st year of a middle school in North America). It was 15 years ago. My school was in suburbs of Moscow, Russia. My first English teacher was an old lady, probably around my grandma age. Her face was wrinkled, her hair was all gray. She was often forgetting what we did in the last lesson. Sometimes she would digress and tell stories about her cat, son and grandson. We addressed to her as Olga Borisovna. Or maybe not,–I don’t remember her actual name,–but let’s keep it this way. Olga was her first name and Borisovna was her patronymic (look it up). We started with an alphabet. Nobody in a class knew how to correctly pronounce all letters by the time of the first lesson. Especially "w", I used to call it double-v. I knew how to count up to 12. "Van", "too", "free", "four", "five", "see-x", ..., "tvelve". My English vocabulary consisted of 25 words, 30 at most. Olga Borisovna learned English in USSR and probably hadn’t lived or studied in English speaking countries. She taught us that in English speaking countries people say "How do you do?" as a greeting. "They don’t want hear an honest answer, you have to reply with the same question", she said. It seemed strange to me. Why would people ask something if they don’t care about the answer? I believed her nonetheless. "This is a table" "This is a chair" I learned "this", "table" and "char but "is" and "a" kept me puzzled. Why don’t they just say "This table" like we do in Russian? What’s the point of "a" and "is"? "We start with present simple tense. There are 9 tenses in English. Actually, there are more, 16, I think, but people don’t use them any more." said Olga Borisovna. It didn’t make any sense. How can it be anything but 3–past, present, future? 1 lesson of 40 minutes every week, 1 year had passed by. On my first English lesson of 6th grade I didn’t remember anything I had learned before.