Some funny English Misspeaks

Teaching English over the past few months, there have been many MANY very funny accidents when trying to learn the language. I will attempt to convey them here, although I don't know how well the humor will transfer. It is interesting as well for Olivia and I, that after speaking with students and non-native speakers exclusively for the last few months, we have begun to make interesting mistakes of our own. I have changed (or just omitted) the names of characters to protect the identities of the offenders.

(This is in no way aiming to make fun of my students, but rather to point out the anamolies of English that native speakers frequently don't recognize, but that are quite difficult for an English student to master...)

One of the best...

Setting the scene: We recently visited a town at Lake Balaton, and an old fire watchtower still exists there. The student asked us what we thought the use of the building was (before we knew it was to detect fires), and I suggested that it was to defend agains the Turks (who periodically invaded Hungary throughout its history). He said, "No, but it is a good guess, there were many watchtowers that were made to defend Hungary against the turkeys. Imagine! 200 feet in the air and worried about turkeys! Ha!

Ok, for another example: A student of mine was telling a story about inspecting a radio broadcasting tower a few weeks ago. He mentioned some city I had not heard of. He was very sure that it was in East-West Hungary...

Olivia and I recently had a conversation, and for some reason we digressed into an interesting topic. She mentioned the "dinosauruses" and which point I started to crack up! Ridiculous! :)

One of the guys who owns one language school I work for recently asked me to lock up after my evening class so he could knock off early. Of course I was happy to oblige, and he (an actor, and very expressive) grabbed the set of keys and said "I'm not sure they work, let's probe." Judging from my reaction, he asked, "not the right word? What am I trying to say?" I offered "try". Then he asked what "probe" means, and I said, "its like when you pick your nose." I guarantee that's what Websters says...

The same guy was working in the language school one afternoon and asked me for a favor. His English is very elementary, so he had another teacher write down a question for me in English, but the desk was a bit messy. In a bit of a fluster, he mumbled out loud, "where is the sheet?" Another English teacher who happened to be passing by at that moment said, "Long EEE sound" ...

Olivia recently had a student reading some paperwork out loud, and they stopped to discuss the meaning of "cease and disist". For those of you not familiar with Hungarian, or Magyar, (which is everyone I am presuming), the "c" sound is pronounced like "ts". The student continued all day saying "cheese and disist".

There have been a million more examples, and I will put them up as I remember. I just thought some of these would brighten your day! And let us all be thankful that we don't have to think about speaking English!

A bit of English language humor...

They say that batteries got a raw deal. When a computer stops working, it breaks. When people stop working, they retire. When batteries stop working, they die. What a life.