The Simple Present

One of the challenges of teaching language is explaining things that seem incredibly obvious. It's not all that difficult to explain or teach TOEIC vocabulary or idioms, although they may be difficult for students to remember or tell apart. It's much harder to illustrate the difference between waiting "at a restaurant" and "in a restaurant", or especially "a restaurant" and "the restaurant". These are the kinds of things native speakers take for granted. A parent might explain to a young child, "a restaurant is a place where we eat", but would never have to explain, "we call it 'a' restaurant because it's not significant which particular restaurant it is".

Ironically, the simplest expressions are often the most difficult to explain or to make clear to non-native speakers, exactly because they rely so much on things that are "obvious" to native speakers of the language. The shortest possible sentences in English, consisting only of a noun and a verb, are examples of this. "We eat" or "I am" look simple, but actually have quite abstract meanings. Unlike "We ate" or "We are eating", "We eat" doesn't refer to any particular event. "We eat" doesn't necessarily correspond to any physical reality. "We are going to eat" or "We will eat" are still clearer than "We eat", because although we can't be sure the event actually will take place, we know what the event predicted by the sentence will look like. "We eat" isn't a statement of expectation; it's a statement of supposedly verifiable fact, just a fact will no clear physical basis.

You can see I'm forced to use pretty advanced grammar and vocabulary to try to explain this very short sentence, "We eat". That's one of the most challenging things about being a language teacher, understanding the complexity of the language without teaching it in a complex way.