While teaching the Advanced Writing course over the past few years, I have witnessed my students’ struggles to master the written form of the English language. Writing is always the most difficult aspect of a language to learn, and learning to write English, especially at the relatively advanced level expected of college English majors in China, is particularly a challenge. Many of my students have succeeded (more or less) in attaining a fairly high degree of competence in writing English at a relatively advanced level (for non-native speakers of English), but even the best of them (let alone those who are less capable) sometimes struggle with the subtleties of the language, which sometimes leads to some rather (unintentionally) humorous results.
One example of this involves a project that I have my students undertake in the second semester of the Advanced Writing course. The students are asked to compose a piece of creative writing in English, such as an original short story or an original poem (some of what they produce is actually rather impressive). For those who do not view themselves as being very creative, I provide the option of writing an English translation of a Chinese poem (or sometimes a poem in another language like Mongolian or Tibetan, as some of my students are ethnic Mongolians or Tibetans). For some reason, many students tend to chose the same poems—many of them poems in classical Chinese that they learned in grade school (I know this from the fact that my daughter had to learn a number of short classical poems as a first grader in a Chinese grade school). A number of these poems have as their subject the vast grasslands that spread along the north of China, north of the Great Wall. However, I often found my students describing this region, known as the caoyuan (草原), as “the prairies”! Of course, technically, the word prairie does mean “grassland”—which is what the Chinese word caoyuan literally means. However, as I pointed out to my students, the word prairie strictly speaking only applies to certain grasslands in North America. Moreover, prairies would seem to have a somewhat different connotation than grasslands—the former seems to evoke early settlers of the American frontier; the latter seems a more appropriate word to describe the homeland of Genghis Khan!
However, perhaps the most humorous example I can cite of this struggle with the subtleties of English comes from a paper one of my recent students wrote. Another assignment I give my students in the second semester of Advanced Writing is to write a brief biography of a famous British or American author. Given that approximately ninety percent of my students are female (many of them are going to become English teachers and traditionally in China women have tended to dominate the ranks of English teachers), it is perhaps not surprising that a number of my students choose to write about one of the famous Bronte sisters. One student this semester composed a rather interesting biography of Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre. What was most striking about the paper was its subtitle: “Geek of the Waste Land”. Needless to say, this title nearly caused me to laugh out loud! After puzzling over it for a while, I concluded the student had chosen to translate the word moor as “waste land.” This would make sense as the Bronte sisters quite famously grew up amidst the moors in northern England. However, unfortunately, the student did not seem to realize that “waste land” does not have quite the connotation that moor does—the former seems rather negative; the latter seems more romantic. Furthermore, the phrase “waste land” evoked for me a rather different writer from the 19th century novelist Charlotte Bronte—the 20th century poet T.S. Eliot, author of the infamously difficult poem “The Waste Land.” As for geek, I really couldn’t figure out why the student had chosen this particular word. Did she really understand what it meant? Was she trying to suggest Emily Bronte was very intelligent? This has remained a mystery.
Nevertheless, I suppose I shouldn’t be too critical of my students. After all, English is a very difficult language to master, with perhaps the largest vocabulary of any language, containing many words that often differ in meaning in rather subtle ways. Moreover, I have to admit that despite my years of studying Chinese, I could never write a paper in Chinese at the level at which my students are writing in English. Still, these unintentionally humorous word choices have, over the years, given me something to smile about as I grind my way through a pile of student papers!
Image: Charlotte Bronte, from wikipedia.org