All things considered, laughter only belongs in a foreign language classroom if it helps build confidence in language skills, and it's really not a good idea to throw your head back and laugh at the mistakes your students make. Although I've tried to hold to this goal, there have been times during my career as an ESL teacher when it was very difficult to keep the giggles away. One older student was describing a scene about skyscrapers in New York, but she kept saying "skycrapper" instead, which had me twisting this way and that picturing some kind of divine lavatory in the sky. Another time a student told me how he fixed his car radio over the weekend, only he didn't say "fixed," but another word entirely which starts with the same letter, and I struggled to keep from laughing out loud at this. We were talking about careers once, and one student who planned to take the test to enter the National Postal Service told me his dream was to become a "post officer," which struck me as amusing, even though it's a logical mistake when you stop and think about it. Then there are those bits of insight that only a learner of a foreign language can have, like my student who observed, "We cannot go to Antarctica because it is under penguin rule." I feel bad about laughing at my students from time to time, although I know that I've given as good as I got, providing the Japanese with many hours of amusement thanks to my own language slip-ups over the years. Like the time I tried to order some mango juice in a restaurant, and substituted a "k" for the "g," resulting in pretty much the rudest word that exists in Japanese (which is "manko" and is a word referring to the female genitals).
"We cannot go to Antarctica because it is under penguin rule."
6 comments:
I can only imagine the look of the juice vendor when you asked for "Manko juice"! ROFL!
That's ok, I suspect you were having a Freudian slip there. let's face it, you're not the only guy in the world who likes that particular kind of juice.
;)
In all seriousness, I could never be an English teacher in Japan, even if I spoke Japanese fluently. Mostly because the incidents of "Engrish" (as we here in the US refer to the linguistic gyrations that the Japanese and others of Asian descent occasionally engage in.) would quickly prove more than my funny bone could withstand. I suspect I would get fired for excessive laughing at the students before the first week was out!
Yes, and the girl was pretty, too. It never fails...
I remember my first class, this one poor student who was doing a phone conversation play with me. She asked, "What is your hobby?" which for some reason is one of the things every Japanese person can say in English. I laughed for some reason, and lo, she didn't come back after that. I was devestated.
Ahh that sounds like an amusing situation. The way I used to say pachinko used to run into my other words though so I sounded like I said "something something -pa chinko" and got weird looks from my friends when I studied abroad.
I usually just go ahead and laugh at my students then if it's something that just sounded really awkward because of grammar I explain it in Japanese (I work for a small company and so am allowed to speak Japanese, which most of my adult students love... until they come up with such an awkward topic that even after they look up the english word I'm like "And how do you expect me to know that in Japanese?"
Kids are great, they love the strange tilted head look I give them when I get the "I am a pen" "You are a..."
Heh, then there are the many times when counting round, spherical objects (which are counted with 'ko') that you end up needing to refer to "10,000 round objects" which is of course 一万個 or ichi manko.
Here is a Youtube video that's somewhat famous, about some lake called Lake Mahn, which of course is manko.
Completely unrelated but the JLPT results came in today and I PASSED!!
Part of it is thanks to your interesting blog. A dumb example is that I'll always remember the difference between 冷たい and 寒い because I read about it here. I don't know why though, it just stuck with me.
Awesome, congratulations!! A proud day indeed.
I remember taking level 1, and there was a question on "uzumaki" (whirlpool), which I'd never seen (渦巻). I guessted at the "uzu" part and was right, it was so excellent.
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