Sunday, July 08, 2007

Funniest student error I've come across

It's easy to laugh (and I have) at the numerous characteristic manglings of the English language perpetrated by Chinese speakers, the dreaded 'Chinglish'; but such inadvertent humour can be just as rife amongst native speakers.... particularly children.... and particularly amongst children who are, shall we say, less educationally-gifted (such as the ones I chiefly worked with during my school teaching days back at the start of the '90s).

The best example I ever encountered came in a composition written for me by a 14-year-old student in my English class. He was describing an incident the previous summer when there had been a small fire on his family's yacht.

He wrote:
"The excitement was mounting, and so was my sister."

As if that wasn't good enough, his next sentence was:
"We couldn't bare any more."

That put a stop to my marking for a good 5 minutes or so. I was rolling around on the floor of my study, howling with laughter.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is excellent.

Anonymous said...

:) thanks for the laugh