Adventures in Translating

So one of the nice things about being a teacher of English -- instead of, say, Chemistry or Algebra or History -- is that your students' mistakes can be funny to non-English teachers as well. I mean, "Oh man, you won't BELIEVE the silly thing my student did today -- he substituted X for Y in step 4 instead of 5 of the equation and got a TOTALLY bogus answer!" or "Wow, Susie did the funniest thing today...she said that William Jennings Bryan was all for the gold standard -- not the silver! Hahaha" -- those things just aren't as funny to thought outside professional circles (actually, they aren't really that funny within professional circles either...).

But foreign-language teaching -- there's a discipline that provides plenty of fodder for hilarity. And my students have not disappointed me thus far into the quarter. Some of my favorite flub-ups:
* During an 'introduce yourself' activity:
One of my older girls writing about the most interesting thing about her: "I am a black man."
* While practicing past tense, another student wrote the following about what he did yesterday:
" I went to the bazaar. I drank Coca-Cola. I did my sister. I ate dinner." (This one made me laugh so hard I had to excuse myself from class)

Part of the reason that these are so funny to me, of course, is that I've made much more embarressing linguistic mistakes of my own over the past 14 months. Last fall, for example, I realized that what I'd thought was the word for "pig" was actually the word for "little boy's penis" -- and finally understood why my classes would erupt in laughter every time we did a lesson on farm animals. I've also asked cab drivers to "please give me a sugar cube" instead of querying whether they can take me to a city named Kant. I've called trees "shits" and asked whether a dish was made of house meat. As a result, I'm now a little humbler and a whole lot more forgiving of others' language mistakes. But that doesn't mean that I can't laugh at my students, too.