Englishisms, Part 1

So it's been a while.  I got back to Hanoi about a month ago after spending a great summer in back in the States with my friends.  But now it's back to the Wild, Wild East, and the frontier style teaching that comes with it.  Textbooks?  Library?  Computer Lab?  Bah, who needs them new fangled edu-macation things?  Students and teachers, one could argue, but they're not an option here, so I continue Little House on the Red River style.


Anyway, one of the more painful things I have to do is teach kids how to write research papers.  Research papers are something they've only had to do if they are in Western schools, and that very rarely.  Vietnamese education tends to rely exclusively on memorizing and testing, rather than understanding.  So, they don't really get the idea.  But that's my job, to teach them how to write, and not just copy and paste an article from Wikipedia, as they are so prone to do.  I doubt that's just an Asian problem though, I'm pretty sure that's an Internet Generation problem, but I wouldn't really know, as I don't teach in the West.  Anyway, here's some pretty good Englishisms I've had so far, all unintentionally hilariously created by my kids in various papers I've had them write.

"The most techonoligcal nation is Finland, althuogh this country was exposed to industrialisation only in the 1050's."

Question, Who in the planet uses the most water?  "In conclusion, people use the water most."

When discussing clean water and poor countries "Firstly, they are still retardation countries, so they don't have ebnough money to buy water."

When discussing special ed.  "In Korea, they have some special schools for Autism, aspergers, handicapped people, and retards."

When discussing soil pollution, "The reason  is soot of cars and factories, chemicultivation, shampoo, and so on."

About Climate Change  "I think we are trying to make the world worse if we don't know how to contribute to climate change."

About Asian diet  "Nevertheless, we are Asians, our father's like dog meats, that's disgusting to me, but some of my friends like it."


About the Vietnamese culture (written by a Viet student):  "But Vietnamese are very lazy, and don't try to learn about new things.  When we go to foreign cultures, people think we rude because Vietnamese people so loud all the time.  And Vietnamese so greedy, they rather live like rats than to spend a little money on nice things".