Palindromes are fun in any language
Teaching August 2nd. 2007, 10:33pmMy director let the foreign teachers in on the “pace” we were trying to finish our book series. We’ve got two distinct sets of classes. Intensive classes in the morning, and and our regular afternoon classes that we have merged into giant classes.
We chose the same books for both sets of classes at similar levels, but need to go at different speeds. Intensives finish the same book the regular classes do in four weeks, as opposed to six weeks. This means my pace for regular classes has been much too fast for the past two weeks.
Instead of flying through ten pages of work in class, I’m forced to cut back to four pages. This leaves a little time to fudge around trying to fill time. Today, I wrote some palindromes on the board so we could chat about them with our free time. I’ve got quite a few English palindromes memorized now, but my students find them really fun. They would exclaim, “Oh! How surprising!” in Korean when I pointed out how they read the same back to front.
In my first class, they taught me a Korean palindrome. “소주만병만주소”, “so-ju-man-byeug-man-ju-so” which means “Give me ten thousand bottles of soju”. That’s a wonderful phrase. Not incredibly practical for most people, but I’m sure it’s been uttered from time to time without people realizing it’s unique.
In my later classes, I taught them how to try to make their own palindromes. It’s not that easy to do. While they were working on their vocabulary tests, I happened to make my first original palindrome. “Step on no pets”.* They were really impressed.
The students in that class taught me two more Korean palindromes:
“수박이박수 ” “su bak ee bak su“, which means “The watermelon claps.”
“여보안경안보여” “yu bo an kyeong an bo yu“, would be “I can’t see my glasses” or “I can’t find my glasses.”
Part of the fun of palindromes is trying to translate or explain what the expression means. The children’s phrases were very simple and easy for me to understand. We managed create a few simple palindromes in class. It was fun to see the students think about words in another way. I also covered ambigrams which are WAY to hard to try to do on a white board.
*I challenge anyone else to make one better and post them in the comments. Originals only!
Bonus: Youtube fun with Weird Al. I need to show this to my students!
2 Responses to “Palindromes are fun in any language”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
August 3rd, 2007 at 12:47 am
I Palindrome I – TMBG
February 24th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
[...] impressed that I could come up with something unique about her name on the fly to help me remember. They don’t know my deep love for palindromes yet. This week, I was going around the same class, the students tried to drop hints for each of their [...]