Funny *#$@ in textbooks?

It’s a great way to teach children sentence structures, and also hide your intentions towards your teaching assistant…

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By boring them to sleep? I don’t remember my books as a wee lad being THIS repetitive.

I don’t remember learning to read, but I have definitely taught sentence structures before.

At least none of the fairies are giving the baby a Cleveland steamer…

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Perhaps, but there’s literally no filler in between these sentences, while it’s plausible these fairies are trying to allegedly offer this baby things, could they not have tied these together a little bit? It’s very sloppy.

No wonder why people have such a hard time learning English, they treat it like Chinese.

I’d suggest you write reviews for children’s books, but it seems your reading level might be a bit too advanced to enjoy them!

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I bloody should! Then I’d rewrite it to make it understandable AND not an absolute chore to read.

And I’ll be sure to put as many innuendos as possible for @tt’s enjoyment.

Kinda like what they do for children’s shows and movies.

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Please draw another girl baby while you’re at it. That one looks creepy

I can write, but I can assure you my art will be much worse.

image

coincidentally i’m reading a book with fairy godmothers right now. it is full of such innuendos as the classic songs “the hedgehog never gets buggered” and “the wizard’s staff has a knob on the end

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No idea what a flub is, but here is an unexpected sample sentence in a Taiwanese textbook for learning German. It says “Who dares to go to the nudist beach at the lake with Tina?”

From the “Strange German stuff in Taiwan” Facebook group:

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Having seen naked middle-aged Germans before, this is a legitimate question.

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I saw one that said ‘i went to Australia on holiday. Someone on the street said “go die”. I was so surprised’

(apparently g’day and go die sound the same :joy:)

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Interestingly, one common way in German to say “bye” is “Tschüß”. Which doesn’t sound too unlike the mandarin 去死 (Qù sǐ = go die).

Oh, and:

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Funny that’s been picked up. I have a student who’s obsessively learning German (I think he’s learned “hallo”, “Danke” and “kaffee” so far, after about three months of probably doing nothing but playing Duolingo in his free time).

Says “tschüß” to me every freaking time he walks away from me. Not one other person in the class has made a connection to “去死”. They’re all just rolling their eyes at him for talking to the English teacher in German.

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I went through the 康軒 junior high English textbooks with a red pen to mark every grammatical and nonsensical sentence structure one year. There wasn’t a single page that was free of my marks. My original plan was to send them to 康軒 and ask them to please take my free advice and also recognize that I do mean this in the most face-losing way possible. Then I wondered if it would be more meaningful if I sent them to President Tsai, though I wasn’t sure what I was trying to accomplish with that plan. I don’t know where the books ended up when I left the public schools. I probably tossed them.

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Actually I just now made that image to post on my FB because I enjoyed the language pun so much.

One of my funny #$@ in textbooks moments: I had just started teaching in Taiwan when I came across an alphabet pronunciation chart in one of the school’s self-made textbooks. The chart had “A is for Apple, B is for Bear…” etc. When I got to K (“K is for Knee”) I began to realize what I’d gotten myself into here :laughing:

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I saw a book that had “x” is for “x-mas”, so I understand exactly how you feel.

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Why, of all things! Failure to capitalize a proper noun is a cardinal sin. :no_no: