Job Discussion Forums

[dyak]

Not literally, but one of my favourite 'tefl moments' is when students of any age discover that different languages have different animal noises. In a multilingual class this kind of entertainment is priceless.

Any other classic tefl moments?

[poro]

Sure, plenty.

Where I come from we do not use certain letters in our language, and so there's almost no distinguishing between b and p, k and g, d and t; and S's are also pronounced very indifferently, and could sound like an English S, a "ch" as in M�nchen, or even a "th" and many variants in between.

The consequence is that a simple sentence like "I am sitting on the floor" can sound almost like something one could be sued for.

We also pronounce letters differently, and always regularly. If the letter is short, there is only one letter; if it's a long sound, there are two letters. So the word "letter" would not be allowed to have two T's in my language the way it's normally pronounced.

This can be embarrassing.

One day, a student of mine said "that's a fact" several times in front of hundreds of people using our pronunciation rules. The letter A is pronounced as a short "aa".

The word "fact" sounded incredibly obscene, and ears pricked up all over the auditorium.

It all goes to show, elocution DOES have a future.

[Guy Courchesne]

Wow, Dave's doesn't have the bandwidth to hold all the funny stories there are out there.

Aside from my own gaffes in Spanish, I've seen some interesting things come up in TEFL course practice classes...nothing like scaring first time teachers!

Last month, the TEFL students designed a class around the context of People we Admire. One of the Mexican EFL students claims Hitler as a hero. That threw the teachers for a loop. Funny though, a lot of creative English was used to make Hitler some kind of hero. Great administrator, good orator, etc. Yeesh. Shocking enough for the TEFLers? well...

Next day, different practice students, same teachers, we are talking about describing our work/school schedules. One student tries out an idiom...'these days, I am working like a n*gger'. After picking our jaws up off the floor (myself Canadian with 3 white American TEFLers), we were all struggling with the decision to either roll up a newspaper and smack the student or try to calmly explain that NO - THAT IS BAD. Poor TEFLers got a very bad impression of Mexican use of English!

FYI - trabajando como un negro is commonly used in low Mexican Spanish, so the student thought to directly translate. I'm sure this has happened elsewhere in the world?

[Twisting in the Wind]

Hahahahaha. That's a good one, Guy.
I'll have to give it some thought as to if my Latin students in Los Angeles have ever said anything that provocative. Cognates. You've gotta lov'em.

For me, that classic ESL moment came in a beginning class of mainly Chinese. We were chorally going over the months of the year.
January, February, etc....

Then we went around the room and each individual student said one month:

September
October
November







Dis-mem-ber



Makes sense if you think about it long enough.

[Guy Courchesne]

good one that Lorena Bobbit could appreciate

[Cardinal Synn]

Yeah, er, hilarious...
There was of course my Spanish student who during a conversation class, asked another student what she had eaten for bre@st fuk that morning.

[Twisting in the Wind]

[quote="Cardinal Synn"]Yeah, er, hilarious...

Guess it was one of those cases of you just having to be there.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[Guy Courchesne]

Do we have a word in English that is derogatory for 'white'? I couldn't come up with anything other than honkey, but that's pretty dated. I've heard Mexicans use 'palido' in a semi-insulting way. Maybe you Yanquis have something?

[Twisting in the Wind]

Since white males traditionally have controlled the language by being writers, editors, politicians, speechwriters, etc., in short, those who've traditionally worked with language and controlled the society, it is no coincidence you are hard-pressed to come up with a derogatory term for "White." "Honkey's" the only one I can think of right off the top of my head, too. But Moonie might have volumes of terms

[Twisting in the Wind]

Because I have nothing better to do with my time right now than flip through these posts, I decided to look up 'palido" in my Cassell's Colloquial Spanish, a book I highly recommend, if you don't already have it. Hey, it could've been there-- they have all kinds of weird words and is very amusing armchair reading, too, I might add.

Anyhoo, no "palido," but under "gringo," the author put (of course "North American") but said it's roughly equivalent in tone to words like "wop," "kraut," "limey," etc.

That got me thinking. You know, we don't have any one word that's derogatory for "white person," but we do for different caucasion ethnicities.

How 'bout "rhythmically-challenged" as a pejorative for "white?"

[Guy Courchesne]

[ContemporaryDog]

The South Asians in the UK use 'gora'. The Jewish people use 'goyim' (although that means anyone non jewish).

[Roger]

Very interesting posts, but I disagree with the person who blamed white males for being selective in derogatory monikers to the exclusion of such for fellow-whites. I think no community chooses pejorative appellations for themselves; these are always imposed by others. Whites don't perceive fellow-whites as fellow-thies but as Arabs and Europeans, Jews and Christians, French and British. Seen from this angle, you cannot avoid the realisation that any white man's language is full of derogatory terms for fellow-whites, and PC seems to apply to non-whites only.
Just how do anglophones refer to French, Germans, Italians? Not a polite way if it is not the dictionary ones. On the other hand, non-whites have all manner of off-putting names for all whites:
- Firangi (in Thailand);
- gweilo (Cantonese speakers);

Others could no doubt dig up more such terms. Suffice it to add that those who use such words may or may not feel hostile to the object so named.

[Guy Courchesne]

Thanks for the bucket of cold water Roger...I was starting to nod off on this thread.