Word for Word pt. 5

Lest you think my students are only capable of techno-brutalized Engrish sentences, I thought I should make mention of a few instances where the electronic translator, well, worked…kind of.
Ex #1
Usually, after working through a new reading passage with my students, I request that they create sentences using their newly acquired vocabulary.  Try as I might [...]

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Word for Word pt. 4

Recently, I was teaching a lesson on clothing to beginner students.  We worked through the standard vocabulary and associated verb structures fairly quickly, so I pushed them to begin describing the clothes.  We reviewed the use of adjectives and I taught them more descriptive vocabulary words (ie.  plaid, striped, checkered); the results, in class, were quite pleasing.
For homework, [...]

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Word for Word pt. 3

While the following does not quite fit the criteria for my “word-for-word” (mis)translations, I thought it such vividly morbid stream-of-consciousness that I dug it up from the archives.
On the eve of Halloween, I asked my writing class to frighten me with a descriptive paragraph about a haunted house.  After reading out the submissions by flashlight [...]

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Word for Word pt.2

According to Aesop, there was once a
goose that laid golden eggs.  Of course, the farmer, who quite happily collected the droplets of pure gold, became rapidly rich and even more rapidly greedy.  Not content to wait through the gestation of gold, he decided to kill the goose in order to harvest, in full, its precious [...]

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Word for Word pt. 1

When learning a foreign language, the real challenge is to begin thinking within the language itself. Prior to anything approximating fluency, the tendency is always to translate word for word from your native language. I remember well my French teachers in grade school bemoaning the inherent English-ness of my written passages.

In Korea, the challenge is [...]

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