Teacher Discussion Forums

I am trying to figure out a creative way to help my Japanese students understand the difference between "I am bored" and "I am boring".

I understand that because of the language structure of Japanese, many students will say "I am boring" when they mean "I am bored".

Has anyone encountered this problem?
Any suggestions for tackling this communication error?

Yeah, I remember that one being a little strange to handle too. I had to explain with diagrams that 'I am bored' expresses the subject's feeling. 'I am boring' however means I make others feel bored. I am the cause that makes others feel bored.

I'm sure there's a better way to make the distinction though. Maybe somebody here has a good suggestion?

I'm afraid I do the same thing, with lots of examples. However, I also tell my students if they can remember that one of them is how you feel, and the other what makes you feel that way, but they can't remember which is which, to just remember "tired." "Tired" is taught very early on as an adjective, and everyone is used to the sentence, "I'm tired." "My work is tiring." is usually a new one to them.

I also used a card exercise in pairs to practice. Students got sentences with the -ing/-ed participial adjective left out. They had to decide if it should go in the "-ing" list or the "-ed" list. It included the use of adjectives before nouns.

I always try to get them to remember "ED for ME. ING for thing" The ED is pronounced using the single letter sounds and the ING as one "word".

same problem with Chinese:

- "If you are interesting in this job, please apply in person..." (from
an advertisement they had to write as homework);
- "If you are boring you had better go home" (in class);

I have no easy fix for this challenge. It clearly is their own language interferring with their English, ah yes, some call this "transference", but I prefer "interference". To me, it boils down to thinking in one language and speaking in another, which requires them to translate every single word as it crops up in their mind.
If we can solve their problem of speaking English in a grammatically-correct way, using verbs in the third person singular form with a final -S, then we can help them in this matter too.

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Roger wrote:same problem with Chinese:

- "If you are interesting in this job, please apply in person..." (from
an advertisement they had to write as homework);
- "If you are boring you had better go home" (in class);

I have no easy fix for this challenge. It clearly is their own language interferring with their English, ah yes, some call this "transference", but I prefer "interference". To me, it boils down to thinking in one language and speaking in another, which requires them to translate every single word as it crops up in their mind.
.

Hmm, I'm not so sure it is their own language interfering. I get the same mistake from almost any language background. I wonder if it has more to do with the construction in English. "Bored" and "Boring" are clearly related and easy to confuse.

Hi!

German students make this mistake too!

Best wishes
Siân

But I do believe it is a structural problem with Chinese, and not a structural problem with German speakers. I doubt you get more than ten percent as many German English learners as you get Chinese who confuse "boring" with "bored" and "interested" with "interesting".
Conversely speaking, if any of us learnt German, we would be faced with the same challenge:
"Du bist langweilig" versus "du langweilst dich".

I'd like to point out that, although I've never worked with Germans or Chinese, this was a big obstacle for the South Korean and Japanese students I've taught.

Hilary Sensei wrote:

I understand that because of the language structure of Japanese, many students will say "I am boring" when they mean "I am bored".

Has anyone encountered this problem?
Any suggestions for tackling this communication error?

With my college students, some years back, I introduced the participles as adjectives topic by using modification. For example:

I am boring (to other people). Other people find me boring.
I am frightening (to other people). Other people find me frightening.
I am interesting (to other people). Other people find me interesting.

I am bored (with this class). This class bores me.
I am frightened (by snakes). Snakes frighten me.
I am interested (in movies). Movies interest me.

There seems to be a general rule (albeit there are bound to be exceptions) wherein participles ending in '-ing' can be modified by the phrase "to other people", whereas participles ending in "-ed" cannot.

In short, as a basic starter rule, I asked my students to use "-ing + to other people" to express causation: "I am boring ("I make other people feel bored.)

All the best,

Cas