"My head is full of porridge"

This is my new favourite expression, courtesy of a lovely Russian lady I’m teaching at the moment. She had been doing some homework to practise using “Needn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t and don’t have to” and found it all a bit confusing.   

My students’ efforts with the English language are often a source of great entertainment, and I thought I’d share one or two of their better efforts with you. I'm laughing with them, not at them, and I'm not telling you anything behind their backs that we haven't already giggled over together in class or outside.

One of the first examples came several years ago when I was doing a lesson with a class about letters to agony aunts. They first had to understand the concept, so I asked them what an agony aunt was.

Silence

Me: “OK...you all know what “aunt” means, don’t you?”

Class: “Yes”

Me:” So does anyone know the meaning of ‘agony?’”

Chinese student:  “Yes....it’s when you are a teenager and you get spots all over your face”

Me: (Trying not to be too discouraging) “Well, not quite....you’re thinking of acne”

More recently, there have been a couple of really brilliant mistakes. The first of these comes courtesy of Maria.

Maria is Sicilian. She’s lived in the UK for many years. Her accent remains almost impenetrable, probably not helped by the fact that her husband is Ukranian, but she arrived in my class determined to improve her English and with it her job prospects. At the time, I had another Italian girl in my class, who confided to me after a couple of lessons that even she couldn’t understand Maria. Of greater concern was that not only couldn’t she understand Maria when she spoke English, she couldn’t understand Maria’s Italian either!  It transpired that Maria’s contributions to the class were largely only intelligible to her and me.

I’ve been teaching advanced-level students for a while now, and one of the things I feel is important  to cover is swearing and profanity. By this stage, they’ve all come into contact with bad language, but the subtleties of this vocabulary, whether and when it’s appropriate, and just what some of it means, can remain a mystery unless tackled and explained in a safe environment. So I have a lesson dedicated to swearwords.

All went well with the class. As usual, there was a bit of embarrassment at the start when I asked them to come to the board and write all the swearwords they could think of, but once they got over that, they set to with gusto and surprised me with the breadth of their knowledge. Maria wasn’t contributing a lot, but, as she explained, being a good Catholic lady, she hardly ever swears, either in Italian or English, so she didn’t know many swearwords. No problem so far. So we moved on to swearwords featuring body parts. I gave the students a handout with various examples of swearwords and the corresponding body parts and bodily functions to which they referred, and stepped back to let them match up the two. When everyone was working away, I walked around the room to check how they were doing. Maria was stuck, so I asked if she needed any help.

“What’s this?” She said “I don’t know this word. What does it mean?”

The word was “prick”. So I explained: “It’s a penis, Maria”

“Oh, right, I see. Like the flower”

“No, Maria. We don’t have a flower called a ‘penis’”

“Yes, you do. My neighbour had some in her garden, and I asked her what they were, and she said it’s a penis. So I went to the garden centre and asked if they had penis and I bought some”

“Maria, really, we don’t have................do you mean PEONIES???”

“Yes, that’s it! Penis”

And finally...this one’s courtesy of a friend, but reader, I was there...

In a previous job, I was responsible for organising language classes in my company. We had loads of French interns who came for a year or so and were mostly already proficient in English, albeit with rather splendid French accents that they couldn’t quite shake. We had to stop the MD from making speeches where he (speaking on behalf of the Board of Directors) would announce “We would like you all to FOCUS” because his accent gave the word a whole new meaning that he certainly didn’t intend.

And so it was that I was approached by one of the interns who asked, on behalf of the group, whether it might be possible for them to have some English lessons to help them with their pronunciation. We organised some classes in the lunch break, and all went well. Until the day that my language training supplier, who was running the classes, came into my office giggling like a schoolboy and shut the door behind him.

“You’ll never believe this” he snorted “but I have to tell you”

Anyone reading this who listens to a French person speaking English will be familiar with the problem of pronouncing words with the long vowel sounds. A French person has real difficulty making the difference between words like “this” and “these” or “heat” and “hit”. If you haven’t come across it, then just remember that a French person will say “it” when they mean “eat”. Which was the problem that the students wanted to address. Using your French pronunciation skills, read on:

Student 1 :“I have a problem in my department. Every time I ask for a piece of paper, everyone laughs at me”

Tutor: “Ah yes, well that’s because......”

Student 2 (interrupting): “I think I have solved the problem”

Tutor: “OK, tell us how?”

Student 2: “I no longer ask for a piece of paper..I ask for a sheet of paper!”

Images courtesy of engrish.com. If you've never visited, check it out!