r/MadeMeSmile • u/-JOMY- • 22h ago

Good Vibes ESL classes be like

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u/dogsledonice 21h ago edited 9h ago

I've taught ESL. You don't truly grasp how stupid a language English is until you try to explain parts of it to someone in words they can understand

or why these all sound different: bough, bought, through, thorough, slough, tough, hiccough

(edit: I think two of them do rhyme; not sure which)

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u/elyankee23 18h ago edited 10h ago

The most pathetic I've ever felt was when I taught English in Korea and my Korean partner (we worked in pairs, the classes saw us both back to back) asked me to pronounce a word and I said "I dunno" and she looked at me like I was a tiny dumb child. "But it's written, right there. What do you mean, you don't know"

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u/chintakoro 19h ago

meanwhile, native English speakers: "I can't believe Chinese has a different character for EVERY word!" So do we, folks. So do we.

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u/Bishopkilljoy 15h ago edited 8h ago

Trying to explain to my friends Vietnamese mother that Buick and Quick do not rhyme was hard to convey

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u/MisanthropyIsAVirtue 19h ago

The order of adjectives has to be: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose. If you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.

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u/vacri 17h ago

And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.

This is such a bad example. I can write a story with lesser dragons and great dragons and some of the latter can be green great dragons and it will sound perfectly cromulent.

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u/dogsledonice 19h ago

But white great grandparents do

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u/MisanthropyIsAVirtue 18h ago

Yeah, but that’s easy to explain since the great is part of the noun and not an adjective.

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u/spacewarp2 18h ago

Tbf this is like every language. I remember taking Japanese and wondering why a certain pattern didn’t exist that would’ve made sense before remembering English has plenty of those. I’m guessing every language has those.

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u/dogsledonice 18h ago

Also funny with Japanese: the people there will argue for hours that Chinese characters are necessary to comprehend their language; they can't use solely a phonetic alphabet.

Then I ask if they speak in Chinese characters. Then I remind them that *I* don't know which Chinese characters are used for the words I'm speaking, but still can speak it with them. Their brains can't wrap around that.

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u/Queen_Euphemia 17h ago

Sure, I mean you could write Japanese in cyrillic and it would work too, it isn't really a language well suited to characters like Chinese is, but if you use the same tactics that Japanese does to adapt them then we could use them in English.

Why should we have spaces in our sentences when "I棲in米利堅for現在." seems like a perfectly reasonable way to write a sentence?

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u/dogsledonice 9h ago

Because learning 26 characters is far easier and more productive than learning 3,000