Haha! I am an ESL teacher in Korea. One of the funniest things I’ve had a student submit was about their family’s favorite foods. A student somehow managed to translate “chicken” as “cock”. More than one of their family members liked “cock” a whole lot.
Oh, I know how that one happened. A rooster is also called a cock, though we don’t much use that word anymore, for obvious reasons. Probably didn’t know the word and checked Google Translate or something similar.
Cock has always meant rooster as its primary meaning, it’s just that back in the day someone thought it would be funny to refer to their penis as a rooster, and here we are, afraid to even use the word to refer to its original meaning…
Well this game is notorious for the cover art and that funny world (The game is easily found on myabandoware, but the cover art itself is rare and this is the highest quality scan of the image i found online. Make of this what you wish but i think it looks funny)
It’s also the French word for rooster (though spelled “coq” in that language). If these kids are learning multiple languages at once, that could cause some confusion, given how often French and English overlap.
English teachers hate this one simple trick!
As someone who understands this language, this is hilarious.
Could you kindly translatem?
You: Of course! Go via metro around the corner.
Bob: Thank you for your help, friend!
You: Nothing of it! (but I don’t know what that last word “удамй” means)
It’s “удачи”=good luck!
Спасйбо, друг 😄
Thanks
It’s around the corner
Thanks friend
You’re welcome
Thanks
De nada
You: Cool! The entrance to the subway is around the corner.
Bob: Thanks for the help, friend!
You: You’re welcome! Good luck.
I have always thought that being able to read, let alone write, Cyrillic cursive is a form of magic. I’ve known a lot of grown Russian men who absolutely could not do either.
Obligatory лишишь (“you will deprive”). Cyrillic cursive really is wild
Uuuuuuuu6
Damn, these look kinda fun…
I feel like at least the example here is very legible. What I can not do is read Sütterlin, a historic form of German handwriting script. The text in this postcard is German, which is my native language. Except for some very simple words like “wir” or “mit”, I cannot read this.
What was interesting about my son with down syndrome: as he learned to read he became a master at reading cursive…somehow.
We’d hand him Christmas cards that we struggled to read from old European relatives(that wrote in older script) and somehow he’d read it off no problem.
My guess is words always needed decoding for him and context played a role in guessing the word, so it became a skill somehow
Can you read Kurrent:
That’s the older brother of Sütterlin. So, no.
Lizbn grofBalmolhmon mind Peril!
According to Google Translate, it means “Lizbn grofBalmolhmon mind Peril!”
I write all text in my own custom font, which only i can read. I cant barely read other cursive cyrillic text.
I can sound out horrific guttural Cyrillic text thanks to Geoguessr, but this just looks indecipherable to me. The urge to leap at typical Latin script pronunciation is much harder to stave off for some reason, and half of the glyphs just look completely alien to me.
Language really is a fucking miracle
I don’t think bad marks were justified. This is how I see every interaction go with polyglot colleagues, its like a modem handshake and they settle into the most comfortable common language
You: you’re inside it already my dude
Bob: o rly?
You: ya rly
Bob: thanks bro
You: the existence of the subway is actually a lie to make Russia look strong to the west.
Bob: oh damn
You: we aren’t allowed to talk about it in English. The birds are microphones.
That’s why mao killed all the birds.
Reminds me of how TV shows / movies just depict characters from a non-English country speak their native language for like 2 seconds before switching back to… English… for the rest of the conversation…
like… huh?
oh yea cuz its fiction and they don’t want the audience having to read subtitles all the time…
Like who does that?
I came to the US at age 8 and still have to use my native language at home… like it feel really weird to be using English at home…
The English dub of the anime Monster has a really funny interaction between the main character (Japanese), a young child (German), and an older couple (English).
Despite the voice actors all speaking English, the main character and child communicate in German. The main character also knows English so he can communicate with the English couple. There are scenes in which they are all together and the Japanese guy has to translate what they are saying to each other, but to the viewer they are all speaking English. The kid and old couple just won’t directly talk to each other.
Do you find it weird that Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and King Lear are all written in English? We’ve been doing this for centuries.
Having a snippet of native language is a more modern invention as far as I know (because if you can’t rely on the audience understanding the language, you need to subtitle the snippet), but it’s just a way of communicating to the audience in what language the conversation is taking place by showing, rather than telling.
I think MGS: 3 does this best. The entire game takes place in Russia and most of the dialogue outside of with command is with Russians so they just say that the characters are speaking Russian to each other. Pretty sure the scientist you meet at the beginning of the game even comments on Snakes Russian being good.
The Hunt for Red October did the same, the first minutes are in Russian with subtitles and then it slips into English mid sentence as if the audience adapted to the language. Very effective actually.
Doesn’t change the fact that it’s Sean Connery’s brogue on a Russian naval captain, but at least it somewhat explains it. Clearly the captain is from wherever the Scottish equivalent for Russia is.
Sean Connery’s brogue on a Russian naval captain
I like how his Highlander character adds Egypt, Japan, and Spain together to produce Scotland.
Sean Connery as Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez, an Egyptian immortal who has lived for centuries in both Japan and later Spain
Pretty sure the Russian equivalent of Scotland is like perm to the southern Murals. Or maybe the Cossack descended cultures, IDK the Soviet kinda fucked over this analogy.
Connery’s character is Lithuanian.
TIL that Lithuania is Russia’s Scotland. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle.
*yeah, not yea or nay. It isn’t a vote.
Yea has been used online as a synonym for yeah for going on 2 decades at this point.
Appreciate they’re both spelt the same, but context clues should help you differentiate. For example, this is a comment on a social media platform, not a spokesperson in a decision making chamber, such as a house of representatives or boardroom; therefore we can safely assume it’s a person agreeing with a statement and not someone calling for a vote.
I reject your reality and substitute my own!
Fun fact, Adam Savage got that quote from an old coworker who lifted it from 1984’s “The Dungeonmaster” which is ‘so bad it’s good’.
Am I missing an eyebrow?
Modern problems require modern solutions!
Sometimes, I think it’s funny that in Anglo countries it’s referred to as ESL, English as a second language.
For us (and I guess many others) it was always English as a foreign language. Could be first foreign language, second foreign language…
second language just means any languages that aren’t your first language. not the second language you learn.
Every time I hear ESL I go “English Sign Language?” before remembering that’s ASL.
Fun fact: American sign language differs from British sign language, as it is derived from french sign language. So a french and American signer would understand each other, while a Brit would not.
I thought it was renamed to ESOL, or English for Speakers of Other Languages, in 2000 or so. I guess that wasn’t a totally universal change.
Now EAL, English as an additional language.
If you’re learning in an English speaking country, they’re not going to call English a foreign language.
Yeah, I think in all countries with universal Education, at highschool level and even earlier there are classes for native speaking kids covering readind and writting in and later knowledge of things like formal grammatical structure and such for the local language, so it makes sense to distinguish classes aimed at foreigners to learn the local language from the ground up from classes aimed at local kids who already know how instinctivelly how to speak it.
So “<Local-Language> as a Second Language” is a valid name, if a bit presumptuous sounding (it makes it sound as if that’s the second most important language one speaks). In other countries I’ve more often seen “<Local-Language> for Non-Native Speakers” or similar, never calling it a second language.
Majority of the world speaks a single language or two at most. Shit half the people I see online can’t even speak one.
It makes sense you when you look at it like that. most people in ESL programs only speak a single language, if you speak more than two you probably don’t need ESL classes and can learn on your own.
Languages come in tiers. English is the global lingua franca. People use it to speak to anyone, no matter whether English native speaker or not. If someone from Norway wants to talk to someone from Japan, they’ll most likely use English since both of them likely speak it.
Then there’s regional lingua francas, languages like Spanish, Russian or Mandarin. These languages are popular in specific parts of the world and often used to get around there. Someone from Ukraine can speak to someone from Belarus using Russian.
Lastly, there’s local languages that are spoken only in a country (or even only a part of a country). People speak them because that’s what they were grown up with.
So in general, there’s 4 “language slots” of languages people speak:
- The global lingua franca
- The regional lingua franca
- The language of the country they live in
- The language they grew up with
One language can fill multiple slots.
So for example, if you grew up in Ukraine and moved to Germany, you might speak the following languages, according to the slots above:
- English
- Russian
- German
- Ukranian
If you are born in Wales and never moved away, it might look like this:
- English
- English
- English
- Welsh
If you spent your life in the US, it would be like this:
- English
- English
- English
- English
This is the reason why people living in countries with lower-tier languages frequently speak 3-4 languages, while English native speakers really struggle to even learn the basics of one additional language. Because the former group has an actual use for more than one language, while the latter one don’t.
Or maybe french is the lingua franca…?
Not any more. It used to be, which is where the term comes from, but it hasn’t been for a long time.
I know I just find it amusing
If you are born in Wales and never moved away, it might look like this:
- English
- English
- English
- Welsh
If you are born in Wales and never moved away, it might look like this:
- English
- English
- Welsh
- Welsh
Welsh is an official language of the UK and most things in Wales are in Welsh first and English second.
Away from the south and the more touristy areas, you’re likely to find people speaking Welsh in everyday life (education, shopping, workplace), rather than just at home.
Oh, and Wales, England and Scotland are countries. The UK is a state made up of 3 countries and a region, whereas the USA is a country made up of 50 states and some territories and districts etc.
I lived in Wales for a year and I managed to learn some very basic Welsh myself. It’s been about 15 years now, but at least back then it was mainly old and very young people who spoke Welsh. Most people aged 20-60 didn’t speak Welsh at all, with the younger ones learning it at school.
But I guess with that generation being up to maybe 35 now, speaking Welsh is likely much more common than it was back then. So yeah, my chart above is likely outdated.
My central point is just that Welsh is one of the languages of Wales and so can be third on your bullet points.
I think it’s at the very least rather undiplomatic to argue that it shouldn’t be called a national language of Wales.I’ve had people swear blind to me that they visited Wales on holiday and Welsh people are rude because they speak English in the shop until an English person turns up and then they switch to Welsh to exclude the English. I think they were mistaken that English was being spoken before they went in (how would they know?) and just assumed they were speaking English until they started paying attention, when they realised it was Welsh. I’m willing to bet £10 that any such people cannot accurately tell me the content of the English that was being spoken until they “switched to Welsh”.
Culturally, ignoring Welsh or downplaying its relevance to real people’s lives is similar in offence to telling British people that they don’t speak American properly, that they spell words like colour incorrectly, and that they should stop putting on their absurd British accent and just speak normally.
I’m not argueing that it isn’t the national language. I just said that you could grow up in Wales never learning Welsh, because English is just as much (if not more) the language used in every-day dealings.
That said, the farthest north I have been was Merthyr Tydfil.
At least in the areas I have been in and the time that I lived there, Welsh was a language you had to actively seek out and not a language that was necessary to know if you lived there.
And that’s the point of the 3rd category: That’s the language you need to know to get around well in that country. If you go to the doctor’s, if you want to talk to your coworkers, if you want to make friends with the locals, which language do you need?
I’m from Vienna and it’s a similar thing with the Viennese dialect. While there is a limited revival happening, it’s mostly a cultural relic more than a necessity in every-day life. 70 years ago, if you didn’t speak Viennese you’d be an outcast. Now it’s rare that someone speaks it.
While I was in Wales I got myself Welsh language resources and actively sought out Welsh speakers to try to learn the language, but of all the people I met there, I only met two adults who could fluently speak Welsh. The kids learned it in school as a second language, but by and large the adults didn’t speak it.
Like I said,
Away from the south and the more touristy areas, you’re likely to find people speaking Welsh in everyday life (education, shopping, workplace), rather than just at home.
If the furthest north you went was Methryr Tydfil, you were never more than 15-20 miles from the M4 corridor, which is where the most strongly English speaking areas are, (apart from South Pembrokeshire and some more touristy bits).
I’m not surprised that you found mostly English speaking in the mostly English speaking parts of Wales. If you had stayed in East Anglia you might have concluded that England possessed no hills at all, but it might be worth admitting that there’s more to know than that.
So,
I just said that you could grow up in Wales never learning Welsh,
(apart from it being compulsory in Welsh schools)
because English is just as much (if not more) the language used in every-day dealings
in the South and more touristy areas, whereas Welsh is the main spoken language in much of the country further North.
Source? I think speaking one language is pretty rare. Most Europeans speak at least two, most Africans I’ve met speak 3, lots of Indians speak 3 as well…
sorry I was wrong, it’s not a majority. It’s roughly 40% of the world’s population.
Fair enough.
Bit of confirmation bias in that, no?
Very possible, that’s why I would love to have a source.
half the people I see online can’t even speak one
It makes sense you when you look at it like that.
Proving your own point, nice.
I think anyone in India and Africa speaks 4 languages easily.
- their regional language (i.e. Masaai, Yoruba, Xhosa)
- the over-regional language (Arabic, Swahili)
- a coloniser language (English, French)
- and possibly just enough of a neighbouring regional language
I think many Chinese people are also bilingual (i.e. Wu+ always mandarin). They often learn another language in school (English or something geographically closer, like Korean).
I think many Chinese people are also bilingual
Yes… some are even tri-lingual because of village dialect (eg: Taishanese) + province dialect (eg: Cantonese) + national dialect (Mandarin)
Unfortunately, the PRC government is heavily pushing Mandarin and some of the local variants (aka: “dialects”) are slowly dying… some kids in Guangzhou don’t even speak Cantonese anymore…
(i.e. Wu+ always mandarin)
Shanghaiese is semi-dead… from what I heard
Cantonese is slowly limping its way forward only because they have Hong Kong TV, I don’t think there are many TV shows in Shanghaiese.
If Hong Kong falls… Cantonese is gonna die… :(
Parents also never spoke Taishanese to me… so yea I unfortunately cannot pass on that language… no Taishanese media… hard to find motivation to learn more about it.
So I only have Cantonese and Mandarin…
I doubt my kids (if I ever have any) would be able to learn it… most 2nd generation overseas Chinese kinda just English-Only with bare minimum in ancestor’s language.
Well, if you add up the number of speakers of second languages according to this page, and assume anybody speaks at least one language as their first one, you’ll end up with almost exactly 1.4 as the average number of languages any given human speaks.
That’s the lower bound, though, as I only added up second languages where the number of speakers is at least one million, and Wikipedia doesn’t list many more anyway.
Viewing it as primary/secondary makes more sense of it.
Remember switching to your secondary language is faster than stumbling over the tip of your tongue.
English as 4th (Spoken) Language Speaker here…
Before English I have:
Cantonese
Mandarin
Taishanese (well… for Taishanese, I mostly only understand but not speak because parents never spoke it to us, only when talking to the older generations and I overhear it)Sorry for the low-key brag but since nobody here speak these languages so I just wanna mention it xD
They don’t mean like a hot list for girls you like or your favorite songs, every one after native is “second”
For me English is my 3rd language.
My mother tongue is Tamil, Malay is my 2nd. I do understand a bit of Hokkien but rarely practice it.
English is my 5th language. Gaelic is my 3rd.
Its ESL in English Speaking countries, and EFL in non- English speaking countries
Because English as an Nth language doesn’t quite have the same ring.
It’s not a foreign language in English speaking countries…
Hhhhehhhhh… Why do some teachers feel the need to be such dicks? Just smile, have a laugh, get with the joke, let it spice up your life.
I can laugh and not give them the points at the same time.
The “???” suggests they didn’t get the joke. Like come on, not even a sarcastic “very funny, 2/5”?
I read the ??? as “Are you fucking kidding me?”
What’s the joke?
That the conversation was continued, just not in English
And to be fair, nothing in the question specifies the language to continue the conversation in.
Sure it’s ESL class, but within the context of this question… No rules were broken.
If it was an English test during the English lesson, then the language is implied.
Might as well continue the conversation with completely unrelated sentences. Maybe the testtaker is socially anxious and ignores Bob. Or murders him.
Nothing says directions have to be provided
Edit: to be clear, in the murder scenario the testtaker is not socially anxious.
It’s a very brave thing to do imo
That’s not a good enough joke for extra credit.
Kinda weird how people hated learning so much they wanna project bad intentions on some question marks and innocence onto the little shit who thought they’d be “cute” and waste everyone’s time. This teacher had a stack of papers to grade. And it was a pretty meh joke in any case.
Same score but an LOL instead of ???
No points for you then.
One time back in AP physics on a test I was prompted with “Find the accelerating force on the electron”. I could not think of the way to do that in the moment, so I literally wrote No, and wrote down a fake answer so I could use that number for the next part of the problem. I got back the test a few days later and the teacher wrote a smiley face down there. Apparently I made her laugh so long and so hard her family had to check in on her so she just gave me the points.
Back in middle school history, they wanted to know who the UK Prime Minister was during WWI, and I couldn’t remember so I wrote down James Bond, and got half credit for making the teacher laugh.
in college calc classes, my handwriting was famously quite poor. I’d scribble down some illegible notes and formulas, draw a few pictures illustrating the problem, then come up with a random answer. most of my classes graded work, not correct answers, so if I had an inkling of the right way to do it I could fake it and usually get at least 75% credit for the question.
always hated the questions that make you use the answer from previous questions. always a good time when you get to the end and have a nonsensical answer and have to redo 4 pages to find where you forgot to carry a 1.
when it’s every now and then it’s great! but some students try to get out of learning by being funny, and it’s your job to actually teach them something
On our German tests back in hs, there was a vocab section where we’d use words in sentences. I didn’t know one of the words in one of the tests, so I wrote “ich weiß nicht was <word> bedeutet”, which means “I don’t know what <word> means”. Our teacher accepted that one with a laugh, but said it was a one time thing and it would not be allowed again. People still tried their luck with similar tricks after that, but got nothing.
Me, I was just surprised she’d never seen that in her career before. I wasn’t expecting to get any points for that. Thought she for sure would have had other smartass students like me.
Thank you for having the sane take.
If it’s homework, the teacher has to grade multiple classes with 30-something students in them, so they probably ran on autopilot at that point.
…equally likely, they had a laugh but this is not an acceptable way to answer it. Most likely done by the dumbass “funny” kid in class who already tired them out.
Plus, if that kid can write in Cyrillic cursive, good for them!
I’m in my master’s program for elementary education. If I saw this, I would just pull them to the side and ask them to translate it to me as English. If it comes out sounding plausible, I’d give them full points because they knew how to say it. They could obviously already read it since they knew how to answer the question. So the writing could come later if that was an issue. I could even try and decode it with a translator first before asking for their translation just to see if they were bullshitting me.
If it was a joke, I’d let it slide but let them know that in the future I need them to write it fully in English.
Yes! Thank you! This is how it should be done. Too much of my education was ruined by burnt-out, jaded teachers who wouldn’t even acknowledge your existence or even laugh at you when you don’t understand why points were subtracted in your test. You sound like someone who’s serious about this stuff, and I’m cheering you on!
Thank you! I’m a late career changer (in my early 40s), but I am loving it so far! I am student teaching in fifth grade currently and absolutely love it. I just want to do things that help others and I feel that teaching is one of those ways I can positively impact a kid’s life.
It probably helps that I’m also a dad, so I do have that empathy and an appreciation of kids and their humor as well.
It’s being a dick to express confusion about why a student is mocking your lessons for them? But the student doing it is just a hilarious and harmless joker, of course. Pretty weird take tbh
You dont even know what subject this test was in. Judging from the information provided in the picture, the assignment was completed. If teachers want the kids to do stuff their way, they’ll need to put more effort into how they word their assignments.
This was very clearly an ESL class and it’s rather insane of you to assume from this screenshot that instructions were in any way close to unclear
Maybe I’m messed up somehow (I guess I am in the 98th percentile of dyslexics), but the instructions aren’t clear to me at all.
This happened a lot to me in reading comprehension exams in highschool as well. I would have hated the teacher and the class had I received a question like this, because I genuinely don’t know how to proceed.
Funny, I did so badly in highschool until grades 11 and 12, where I started the IB, got a different set of teachers, etc. And suddenly I get straight As (or in IB lingo, 7s) instead of Cs. And I think a big factor, not kidding, was the style and formulation of exams like these. It really does make a difference for some people.
Good test design would be to have Bob‘s first answer already filled in, so you get a pointer to how the dialogue is supposed to develop. Or just to have an oral exam, which I think are superior anyway.
This is a tiny cropping of the page. There’s barely anything to go on, yet you and op jump to conclusions that it’s unclear.
Seems pretty clear to me. You see “Task 3,” instructions (“Continue the dialogue with Bob:”, capital C for continue and colon ending the clause), and then “Task 4.” But you can come to your own conclusions, if you think context is missing.
Forgive me if I am not so sympathetic with the teacher who created/graded this. My experience of school was much closer to a torture experience conditioning me to be a good little servant than anything else. I had overwhelmingly bad teachers who made that experience all the worse and should never have gotten and kept their teaching positions. Though I remember the few good teachers all the more favorably, and have stayed in touch with a few of them. This is just to say that I’m a little biased, but that bias is also rooted in reality.
This act you’re doing where you pretend to care about something which is not relevant here is pretty tiring. We cannot see the entire test and therefore random shit we pull out of our ass about how the test is poorly designed is meaningless as fuck.
What we know is a kid was a smartass and you’re on their side because you were that smartass and now you want to play the victim. Future replies will be blocked.
Judging from your post history, I only get the impression that you like to argue.
Cool. I didn’t read your post history. But I can see here that you have no empathy for a teacher but will bend over backwards for a student trolling them.
How the dialog trully should have happened:
Reversed, this is how English as a first language conversations go in foreign lands
In many countries they don’t even ask. They recognize your accent and reply in English right away.
Very much how it is in Québec which is unfortunate as someone trying yo better my French
So I find it to actually be a really helpful “barometer” of language skill. When I’m in France, if I go in a store and conduct s full conversation in French, I know my accent, word choice, and general language skill is good. If halfway through the exchange we switch to English, I know I either made an egregious language error or I started sounding like an American. If the conversation switched to English right away, I either made a critical language mistake OR I just happened across a very competent English speaker.
I can carry a basic conversation - certainly enough to get by and be understood. Last time I went to Quebec though, most locals were like “hell naw” and assumed I couldn’t. Here’s the thing though: this was without hearing me speak a single word. They had an uncanny ability to just guess my primary language by appearance alone. I’m guessing they could tell I was American, maybe based on subtle mannerisms.
This is in Montreal, btw, where French and English seem to coexist as two primary languages. I did spend some time around the Mont Mégantic valley area, though. (A super rural area between the border and the cities, basically farm country vibes). There, I encountered people in the tiny village markets and service stations whose English was definitely worse than my French. I was able to get some practice in with them, but I could tell they didn’t necessarily like it much, haha!
sounds like you need to work more on your “hon hon hon” and a little less on your “baguette”.
In American English it would go
“Do you speak English”
“Nein”
“O K. I. Will. Talk. Slow. So. You. Can. Under. stand. Me.”
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Why would the question have 5 lines instead of 3, it’s almost entrapment
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