Embarrassing English Lessons

Sept. 21, 2005- Tiffany
A benefit of having friendly bilingual co-workers is they act as great on-the-spot Mandarin tutors. Over the past few weeks, they have had no problem answering my simple questions of how to say basic items like phone, computer, apple, etc. They display much patience with my pronunciation, and are very excited when I say the word just right. In return, I often act as their English thesaurus as well as teach them English slang (the word of the day yesterday was ‘mooch’, as in she never pays for lunch, she’s a ‘mooch’).

Today, I got into a bit more uncomfortable situation. The other intern was unable to come in to work due to a bad reaction to something he ate. This prompted an awkward discussion about English terms for bodily reactions/functions. They each wanted to be able to not only say these words with perfect pronunciation, but spell them as well. I not only (uncomfortably) helped them with the words, but also gave them an etiquette lesson on when it is appropriate to use these words when dealing with Americans, as we (or at least I) seem to be a bit more modest. Needless to say, our term of the day was ‘too much information’!