quothe the sensei, "hm, no, not quite right"

Most of you are probably familiar with Engrish, the art of inadvertantly funny English signs and slogans seen across Asia and the world. While not ad campaign masters themselves (yet, anyway), my students have made some of their own contributions through their written assignments and verbal answers.

It's high time to share some with you.

1. A very bad weekend

One of my classes did a scavenger hunt/ quiz rally as a final activity in the directions unit. Some groups finished way faster than others, and I wanted to keep them from being bored. So, I asked them to ask each other about their weekends in English and write down something interesting another student did, and then show it to me. They started talking while I finished off the game, and at the end of class, one girl brought her mini-report back to me. It read:

What did you do this weekend?

I was confiscated my cell phone by my English teacher.

I caught a cold.

This put me in the awkward position of laughing and trying to look sympathetic at the same time.

2. Animal, vegetable, mineral, or abstract concept?

After another class finished early with the scavenger hunt, the teacher and I decided to have them play a vocab game. There's a Japanese game called shiritori, where you have a category of words and go around in a circle saying words from that category; however, you must use the last character in that word to start your next word. I had the students play this game in English.

One student surprised me with gnu. However, a few students down, someone had to think of an animal that began with "A." Most people would have said ant, antelope, or ape. This student was thinking outside the box. Far outside the box.

He answered, very cheerfully, "AN ANGEL!"

I let it slide.

3. The most difficult thing

For a grammar class, the students read an article in English about the Chilean miners who are still trapped underground. After reading the article, the students were to write a short answer essay about how they would deal with being trapped underground for a month.

Generally, the compositions went like this one:

If I were trapped underground, there would be no day and night and no entertainments. I would soon lose my joy for life. But after a while, I would get used to it.

However, one pragmatist added a little something:

The most difficult thing would be to defecate.

I was looking them over for a teacher, who was standing right there when I was trying desperately not to laugh. She saw my face and then read it aloud, not quite sure of the meaning of the last word. Then she asked if it was okay. I said that the grammar was correct and it was a valid concern.

I love my job.