I was at lunch yesterday after church with several people from the worship team; Larissa, the worship leader and an English teacher at a cram school (I’m the only one of the group not currently teaching), related her teaching highlight of the week:
Whenever the kids would finish whatever activity they were working on, they would promptly proclaim: “Teacher, I finish(ed)!” Pretty close, except that Chinese people have horrible trouble with closed consonant sounds, so their pronunciation of “finish” often comes out all wrong*. Larissa, tired of hearing the word “finish” constantly being butchered, finally instructed them to say “done” instead (true, it’s grammatically incorrect, but oh so much easier to pronounce..). The end of the next activity earned Larissa a chorus of “Teacher, I dumb”. Not exactly what she had intended since she’s not there to teach the kids how to unknowingly denigrate themselves, so she promptly corrected them. Sadly, their mispronunciation of “done” at the end of the next activity was no better than their first. Decidedly worse, in fact. “Teacher, I dung!”
Larissa didn’t say if she had the students go back to saying “finish”..
__________
(*) Closed consonant sounds like the letters “F” or “L” (eff, ell) generally end up being pronounced “effoo” and “elloh” by Chinese people. Chinese consonant sounds almost all end on an open vowel sound (bu, pu, mu, fu…), so the Chinese mispronunciation of the “sh” sound often comes out as something close to “shee” (German shü) — “finish” ends up sounding like “fee-nee-shü”. Making it past tense (finished) just leaves you with “fee-nee-shü-d(uh)”.
Totally unrelated but thought it was funny:
Dr. Seuss Explains Why Computers Sometimes Crash:
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort,
and the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
and the double-clicking icon puts Your window in the trash,
and your data is corrupted cause the index doesn’t hash,
then your situation’s hopeless and your system’s gonna crash!!
If the label on the cable on the table at your house
says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
but your packets want to tunnel to another protocol,
that’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
and your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse;
then you may as well reboot and go out with
a bang, ‘cuz sure as I’m a poet, the sucker’s gonna hang!
When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy in the disk,
and the macro code instructions cause unnecessary risk,
then you’ll have to flash the memory and you’ll want to RAM your ROM.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your Mom!
Does that make it clear for everybody?????