I just thought I’d share with you a tid-bit that sheds light on the complexities and humour that comes with learning a new language.
Yesterday in my C-13 class (high level learners usually in the 13-16 year old range). We were doing a reading about different forms of entertainment and in the text was the word ‘superb’ I got the kids to underline all the words they didn’t know in the text so we could go through them one by one. The conversation went something like this:
Me: “Any words in the first paragraph you don’t know?”
Jacky: “Yes, ‘Super Be'”
Me: “Super Be?”
Jacky: “Yeah. First line. ‘The play was super-b!'”
Me: Shakes head and realizes this learning English thing ain’t so easy.
The converse of this was shown today in my Chinese lesson when Ryan Wang and I were doing a reading with some new vocabulary. One of the new terms is ‘ding’ (定) which means ‘to decide, to fix, to set’. To make verbs past tense in Chinese you add ‘le’ (了) to the end. It had myself, Ryan W. and Carol (our teacher) near tears when in the reading he hit the term ‘dingle’ (定了) and couldn’t resist saying “DINGLE” not “DING LE”.
Anyway, hit 4,482 words today. Not where I need to be, but moving forward.
And for some humour, check this out: http://harpers.org/BubbaTea.html
Some excerpts from My Life: Bill Clinton’s memoir, as seen in the unauthorized Chinese translation version. Who knew Clinton had such an affinity for Deng Xiaoping and China?
