My Lovely Students

Repost old blog entry on September 15, 2006

My Lovely Students

I have to continue our target lesson for this week: Asking and giving directions. So, I let my students listen to the following conversation on the tape:

A woman: Hi, I need some directions. Do you happen to know where the hospital is?

A guy on street: You bet! It’s on …..

OK, I let them listen to it a couple of times without any written handout at hand, and had the lights off. In the dark, they can have better sense to “hear” things. Then, we had a great discussion about what they heard.

• “Sandy” popped out first: “I sink the man say: ‘You back’, be-causi the woman want to hospital, her back is pain, so, it  ‘you back’.”
• “Leon” disagreed: “No, no, I think the guy is not good. He is kinda ‘bu` hao`’ (not good in Chinese), so, it is “You bad”…”
• “Xiao Hong” continued: “I think it’s “bed”, she want to go hospital a bed, tired, you know, sleep on bed…”

Anyway, I put all the possible answers on the whiteboard, along with the correct “You bet” to help them make a decision. It turned out, everyone thought “You back” make more sense in this dialogue… !$%^&*

When I announced the accurate answer and explained this colloquial expression to them, they all said “English is difficult!! Strange!!”.

BTW, Ben gave me a fresh fig grew in his backyard 2 days ago. A-Ling’ gave me some home-made dim-sum yesterday. Jenny brings me vegetarian food almost every day. Mostly fresh fruit salad. And she’s gonna bring me some vegetarian moon cake tomorrow. Don’t you just love them?