The funniest thing ever.

On Saturday at the dorm, the students do this thing called Saturday Night Fever, which was started by a teacher a few years ago. Each night we have announcements at 9:20, but on Saturday, one or two students get to do an announcement of their own. They choose an English-language song, play it over the PA system (as it the custom every night, and also during the insane amount of other announcements they have during the waking hours), and then talk about it, do a little skit, etc. Last week a girl pretended she was a radio DJ and was doing a radio show. This week, two girls decided they wanted to an animal sounds quiz, because animals make different sounds in English and Japanese.

So they come to me to check their grammar and the sounds themselves. The first thing they wrote was

bow wow bow wow
bow wow bow wow

Can you understand? Okay? Colect answer is dog!

Next,

vomit vomit
vomit vomit

This cry is from a flog!

And then I laughed for like an hour and told them what vomit means, and they also laughed a lot. Then I colected the sound to ribbit ribbit, and fixed their grammar and spelling, and we talked about other animals. It was very funny.

I have an update here: I was talking to those girls about frog sounds again, and found out that in fact Japanese flogs do say "vomit vomit." The word for both "vomit" and "ribbit" is "gero," and the electronic dictionaries all these students have probably don't include animal sounds in English, so it assumed "vomit," and that's where the confusion came in. It all comes together now.

In a related English mishap, a girl was eating these tiny dried fish at dinner a couple weeks ago, and these things are very sharp. She wanted to say it was hurting her mouth, but Asians somehow end up learning wicked advanced words before they can master simple sentences like "It hurts," so she said "It's aggressive in my mouth." And I laughed for a very long time at that time, too.

The End.