English Lessons

As a student in a foreign country, I often experience random moments of hilarity. There was listening to the latest Eminem song on the radio in the car with the host parents...Host mom said that she couldn't understand the words; I smiled at her and thought to myself, "That's almost certainly for the best." There was realizing that the Chinese word for yogurt is translated literally, "sour milk." There was hearing one of my classmates, intending to ask the professor if he might ask a question, confuse the pronunciation and ask instead if he might kiss him. These moments aren't uncommon, and their randomness makes them that much more fun.

The random moments are always fun, but I can always look forward to a good laugh when I help my host sis with her English. Every college graduate in China must pass a series of English exams, of which there are four levels. The book that my host sister is using is the study book for the second exam, the one that her class is using. It has dialogues, articles, and preposition and pronoun fill-in-the-blank sections, ­and it definitely wasn't written by a native English speaker. That's not to say that it doesn't have sophisticated vocabulary; in fact, much of it is quite difficult. And it's obvious that the authors had studied English idioms and common phrases. It's just little syntax convolutions or awkward phrasing that gives it's origin away. Aside from the funny phrasing, the subject matter of the articles is often quite humorous. ChengCheng and I have read about weather conditions in the United States, Baby Boomers, Stratford-upon-Avon, and the changing relationship between bosses and employees, to name a few. To give you a better idea of the comic side of these lessons, I've decided just to give you some quotations:

(Talking about the cost of a Chinese cartoon)
"Small peanuts to Disney, perhaps, but in a country in which actually all local production houses have turned away from this form because it isn't likely to make profits, the amount ain't exactly spare change either."

(A little more morbid, from an article titled: "The Boys With Arms")
"Imagine fifteen-year old Kipland Kinkel in Springfield, Ore., chatting with two friends on a three-way phone call May 20, probably while his father's dead body lay on the floor, a bullet drilled through his body."

(From one of several selections about Western music)
"Punk is best known as a musical style. Songs were short, loud, and angry. They grabbed people's attention. This was partly because people formed bands first and learned to play afterward if they bothered to learn at all."

This is just a small sample, the book really is a comic gem.

The other night, host mom asked if I might help her with her pronunciation on some stuff for her work. (I will insert the side-note here, that when ChengCheng told me her mom made rockets she wasn't lying, host mom is apparently the chief engineer in her plant, which works on the Chinese manned space flight craft.) She gave me a pamphlet and asked me to read each sentence first, and then she would repeat it. This was a different kind of funny from ChenChen's English work. I struggled to remember my scientific abbreviations as I clearly enunciated (host-mom was taping this) sentences such as, "Plasma immersion ion implantation is a non-line of sight novel technique." Lovely. So, Host mom got an English lesson, and I was reminded why I decided not to major in physics or chemistry.