It finally happened...

So we all hear stories of when a volunteer accidentally said the wrong Armenian word and something horrible has come out and you don’t know it, and everyone laughs, or cries. Well I was waiting for this to happen, and it finally did.

So for the last 2 weeks, we have had Armenian language in the morning, then in the afternoon for an hour we teach a health related lesson to the local students in our village. Basically everything has been crazy cause we don’t speak the languge very well, and we are trying to be creative, so we spend countless hours preparing, then to just barely get our point across, and we have the worst kids known to man, seriously they are crazy, but still a lot of fun. Whatever though, I signed up for it haha

So on Thursday I was teaching a course on nutrition and I made a little game, so as I was holding something up, I wanted them to look at it…..

Let me stop here and give you a small Armenian language lesson. So in Armenian, they have something called the imperative mood. In English, it may sound rude, but here it is used as a command and it is used a lot in the classroom. So to give you an example, if I wanted to tell the students to come, I would just say yekek, and I would be commanding them to come, so it would be like me just yelling, COME! And it can be used for anything, WRITE, GO, READ. So much for asking politely…

Anyway, so I was wanted my class to look at something, and I was trying to use the verb to see, tesnel, which conjugated in the imperative mood is TESEK. So as the class was getting louder and louder, I knew what to say, and I wanted them to listen and look, so I meant to say LESEK yev TESEK, LISTEN and LOOK.

However, here is the punch line. So instead of saying TESEK, I didn’t pronounce the first E, so I said TSEK. And I repeated it like 4 times, TSEK, TSEK, TSEK, TSEK. After which they all started to snicker, and so did my tech trainer who was observing me teach. I forgot to mention that I was teaching 13 and 14 year olds, the age where no one is immature at all… ya right.

So turns out that the word I was saying, TSEK, is the verb to fart…. Ya. So I was repeating it over and over again to some 14 year olds, fart fart fart. And I wasn’t just politely asking, remember I was using the imperative case. So I was commanding them, all, to fart, 4 times. Its like if some one from an authoritative position just started yelling at you to fart instantly. I didn’t know this of course, we don’t use the verb to fart in class, it isn’t on our list of important verbs to know, although it should be.

So after the class was over, I was given this information in my feedback discussion from my tech trainer, and we all had a good laugh about it.

So needless to say pronunciation of every letter in a word is now on my list of things to practice before my final language proficiency test which is on Monday. I don’t think the testers would appreciate it if I walked in and started commanding them to fart….

“Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.”