Learning another language can open up valuable opportunities in both our personal and professional lives, since we are more globally interconnected than ever before. Why, then, do foreign language textbooks make it so damn hard?
If you’ve ever taken a foreign language in school, you surely remember the inane dialogues and ridiculous sentences in some of the texts.
“The word is that an elderly person lived by himself in the house that was destroyed by the fire yesterday”
“I saw my house burn in a fire.”
“I heard that Yamamoto-san has been alone since his parents died when he was sixteen years old.”
“Although the baby is crying, the mother is doing nothing.”
“I heard that the tiger that escaped from zoo yesterday was killed.”
The book’s speaking exercises are pretty good too. It’s likely students around the world came up with some very awkward dialogues using this prompt from Chapter 9:
“Your boss makes you do a lot of things that aren’t part of your job. Describe things you are forced to do and complain to your co-workers.”
Other textbooks find it necessary to throw in an excess of random cultural minutia that are supposedly there to make your language learning experience richer.
A beginner’s Swedish text published by the NTC Publishing Group is probably the best. In one chapter, it teaches how to most effectively black out at a Swedish drinking event:
“The Swedish national strong drink is snaps … The first snaps should be swallowed in one gulp, with the next one half a glass … if you continue you’ll likely end up under the table!”
Then in the next chapter, the cultural section provides tips on how avoiding hitting elk with your car. With these two cultural concepts mastered, you’re surely ready to blend into Swedish society.
In the Business World
Some foreign language textbooks certainly leave students a bit confused, even after their final lesson. But at the highest levels, such as multinational corporations, they have it all figured out, right? Maybe not so much.
Pepsi, for example, attempted to promote their slogan “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation!” in China, but the marketing executives must have been studying a questionable textbook because it was translated as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.”
Do you have any foreign language class horror stories or other examples of things that have been lost in translation? This type of blunder is often tickle city!
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on August 3rd, 2010 at 11:28 am
ticklish. i’ve heard that the Chevy Nova befuddled spanish speakers because it translates to “NoGo”
on August 3rd, 2010 at 3:14 pm
In my Latin textbook from high school most of the sentences were about beating slaves. “Davus drove the carriage into a ditch, so Cornelius beat Davus with a stick”
We also learned several (at least 4) words for carriage in the first several chapters, and after three years and a half years of Latin I never learned how to even count to ten.
on August 3rd, 2010 at 7:29 pm
I don’t know about textbooks, but I can attest to Rosetta Stone having ticklishly blunderish features as well. Many pictures portray small children speaking, but are read with the same voice as a grandmother one picture over.
Perhaps it’s a fact of life that learning a language includes learning the product makers’ quirks as well.
on August 3rd, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Company blunders are undoubtedly the best. There are the classics like the Ford Pinto, the IKEA Fartfull, and the GEC-Plessey Telecommunications (GPT) pronounced as “J’ai pete” in French, translating to, “I farted.”
The most recent one I heard, however, tops the charts for embarrassingly dirty blunders: the Swedish company “locum” sent electronic christmas cards to their employees and, adapting their company logo for the holidays, changed the “o” to a heart shape. As you can probably imagine, it apparently didn’t turn out so well…
on August 8th, 2010 at 6:26 am
During our trip to Tokyo, we saw a sign for a Gentleman’s Club featuring two provocatively dressed women and the words in English “Hyper, Sexy, Conscious.” I turned to my wife and said, “Everything I want in a woman.”
on August 18th, 2010 at 8:19 am
You should definitely read David Sedaris’ When You Are Engulfed in Flames. One of the chapters in the book is the diary he kept while living in Japan. Here is a link to a short reading (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo98DQnvYOM). Also, you should definitely glance at this New York Times slide show of Chinglish (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/05/03/world/asia/20100503_CHINGLISH.html?emc=eta1).
on January 15th, 2011 at 10:56 am
I felt like writing to Bimbo the Mexican baked good company and telling that if they want to market succesfully to English speakers they are going to have to fina another name because bimbo means stupid woman in English.