Creative English Used by my Japanese Students

When a person learns a foreign language, they tend to be very creative in that language because they lack the inhibitions that native speakers have developed over time. Back when I was a teacher I was entertained by various statements made by my students, like one who observed, “We cannot go to Antarctica now, because it is under penguin rule.” Or the student who reasoned that a person working in a post office must be a “post officer,” which sounds almost logical. There was one lesson I did using obscure icons which students were to discuss the possible meanings of. One sign for “nature walk” showed a picture of a leaf with a footprint on top of it, and one student suggested that it might mean “Don’t despise Canada.” Then there was a student who was asked to make the sentence “I go to Tokyo” into the past tense, and her his (joking, I presume) response was, “I go to Edo.” (Edo is the old name for Tokyo.)

“The past tense of Tokyo is Edo.”