Attack?!

This week I have been doing one of my favorite lessons with my students, it is all about giving advice to various problems and I always enjoy the creative ways that students use this lesson.

To start, each student is given a piece of paper with either a problem or a piece of advice written on it. Then, they must stand up and find another student in the classroom that has the correct advice for their problem. Once they think they have a match, they come up and ask the teacher if it is ok. The thing I like most about this activity is the way that it forces students to talk, in English, with many different people and they way they must mix with one another. I find that Japanese students spend a good portion of their day sitting, passively, in their desks, so getting them up and moving is really important to me.

Once they have their match they sit down to work with their new partner, pretending to be advice columnists. I rarely collect their work at the end of class because I like them to be able to use it and reference it again, but at the end of this class I always collect their work because it is just so damn hi-la-rious!

I thought I would share some of the advice that they came up with for this particular problem:

Now, most of the advice they came up with was pretty straightforward.

Talk more with her, yep that makes sense to me!

You should forget her, or you should say to her, “I love you, I need you, I want you.” Interesting!

This one I was just completely impressed by the amount of writing and the quality of English. Obviously it was written by some of my super-star students.

Tell her your name, sure. That is simple.

As I said, most of these make perfect sense to me. I understand how the students came up with all of them. But then I got at least 10 papers where the advice went something like this:

What’s with all the attacking? Am I missing something? Is this a vocabulary word that they just learned and they aren’t quite sure about proper usage? As I read paper after paper advising the letter-writer to attack the girl, I couldn’t help but laugh. I love how language is so convoluted and difficult that even the simplest thing can turn out to be a really strange, humorous mistake. Eh, at least they tried!

Posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 5:42 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Attack?!”

  1. Christina says:

    there was a song by Cameo called ‘Attack Me With Your Love’, maybe they’re all into 80’s soul…

  2. Eric says:

    Danielle,

    I don’t think they really mean attack. I think that something is lost in their translation. I would bet that if you asked your students for the Japanese word for “attack” you would find that that Japanese word had another English meaning. This other meaning, I would bet, would be much more effective than an attack in winning another’s affections.

    Eric

  3. Rollergirl says:

    I agree with Eric. I say it’s supposed to be something like “approach”. And if so, they are all some pretty smart students when it comes to matters of the heart. 🙂

  4. Marc says:

    I think what they are trying to convey is “to take the initiative”, “to be proactive”, or simply “to be bold”. Think of it in terms of Chess or Go. I am sure most of them aren’t suggesting physical assault.

  5. Ella says:

    I agree with the idea that, while funny, this is one of the difficulties of translation. One example I had last year was the use of “knee breeches” to express what we would normally call “shorts.” The danger of relying on dictionaries is that the words you find are completely reasonable but may not make any sense.

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