In addition to some classroom teaching, I have been teaching English online. One factor that is definitely involved is cultural differences and culture shock on the part of parents who might not even be visible to me during class time, but who can see and hear the entire class.
In English, the phrase, too bad, is never used to describe something as bad - at least not as far as I understand. Perhaps with the exception of a sentence such as, "This item is too bad to use". Too bad is nearly always a phrase used to express sympathy, empathy, pity, compassion, or even disappointment. In a recent class I taught the word "sad" and then asked my student if he was sad (and he answered he was). The parents (who admitted their English is not very good) took this with offense, assuming that I meant their child's English or response was bad. I told this to a lady here in Taiwan whose English is very good and she said evidently it must be culture shock.
I feel bad for those parents because they will probably be upset over a plethora of little things done by their son's English teachers that are simply lost in translation. I truly feel this is too bad.
I had heard before, actually, that much of China is so unaffected by outside and/or international cultures that when Chinese interact with foreigners or move to other countries they suffer more severely from culture shock than people who have plenty of foreigners living around them or near them.
No comments:
Post a Comment