English Turrets

As a part of our work at AGCHO we teach English to our employees. Dave does formalized training twice a day, probably for about 30-60 minutes a day. Frequently the students will come in with questions about words that they have heard on movies or TV, they will also pick up things that you say and ask what it means etc. There have definitely been some funny words and occurrences dealing with learning English.

After a rough day where Shikeab lost all of the data on his hard drive, he returned the following day with the word “suffering”, I told him I was suffering with him.

Often times I will hear what the students are saying in Dari and think it’s an English word. Once I over heard what I thought was Fawad referring to Nesar as “Honey”, I asked, did you just call him honey? He said no, and then proceeded to ask what honey meant. So I explained it was honey that you eat, but also a term of endearment for your special someone. Occasionally, someone gets called honey.

However, my favorite English story is about Nazir. Nazir will pick up on a word or sentence and then repeat it over and over again, but extremely fast. So fast that I couldn’t always understand his English, so I always have to tell him to slow down and to pronounce each word distinctly. Apparently he speaks Dari very quickly as well, and his co-workers have to tell him to slow down frequently too. I was telling one of my friends about Nazir and how it made me laugh how fast he said things etc, his response, “it’s like he has Turrets”.  And really, how can you not laugh about that?