Awkward Vocabulary

Sometimes, teaching English is inherently awkward.

Today at breakfast, one of the students said to me, "Heidi... hip... (here she pointed to her posterior) poo?" Here she made a hand motion that was awfully illustrative.

I blinked a few times and said, "Sorry, what?"

"Hip... sound... poo?" Same hand motion. I could feel my face getting red and tried to choke back my laughter.

"Um... I don't know what you're asking," I said, looking around desperately at the other students for some sort of clarification.

"Window breaking!" One of them declared. Ah. It was starting to make more sense and I realized with no small relief that I wasn't going to have to explain any scatalogical terminology at the breakfast table.

"Ohhh, you mean, 'breaking wind,'" I explained.

"Breaking wind-o?" they repeated. Japanese students have a tendency to put vowels on the end of their words, because Japanese words have no final consonants. Add to that the fact that word order is pretty much mirror opposite that of English and you get things like, "window breaking" instead of "breaking wind."

"Yes, they say that in England, but we don't really say that in America."

"Ehhh, soo desu!" In Japanese this is the equivalent of, "oh, really!" and I hear it all the time. "What word?" they asked. Oh here we go.

"Fart."

"Fat?"

"Fart."

And so it began, all the students practicing their pronunciation. "Fart. Fart. Fart." And I tried gallantly not to choke on my coffee.

One of the students, noticing my amusement and embarrassment, looked around and said, "More loud voice please!"

Everyone laughed, and I explained that we don't really talk about farting in polite conversation.

"Sorry," the first student apologized.

"That's okay, it's a good question."

"I'm always fart," she explained.

Hm. Now I only need to explain that their hip is not the same thing as their, er, bottom.