Live from Japan!

I feel I should give you some background information before you really get a good look at todays engrish. It comes from my final exam. I had the students listen to a simplified version of my pants story. Then answer some questions about it. It turns out that the students have a hard time distinguishing between “Pants” and “Pens”. So, to the question of “What did Aaron lose?”, many wrote “Pens”. Some went a step further and wrote out a full sentence. “It was pens.” “It” only serves as a marker for the subject, which is known (“Aaron’s lost thing”) so it was often ommitted. They don’t have a distinction of plural and non-plural so the final “s” was often removed (Incidentally “It” should be “they” and “was”, “were” too.) Finally there was frequently the mistakes about tense replacing “was” with “is”. Leaving “Is pen”, which I saw a lot of. Basically a direct translation of the Japanese “Pen desu”. The trouble just comes in when they tried to follow the Japanese word order.

In that case you get todays Engrish. “What did Aaron lose?” Well… I’ll let the student speak for himself.