BERKELEY, Calif.– Japanese professor Manko Wareme was in for a shock Monday, after coming back from the weekend to an irate yet incoherent, poorly-structured, and grammatically-stupefying email from one of her students.
“Good Morning Wareme-Sensei,” read the dumbfounding email, sent at 11:48 P.M., translated (the best one can) into English. “I is to you writing to be is anger of very days. I fill with big energy and tests and homework and delicious necktie. You endow me the big big sad, very.”
The student, one Jacob Handel, was adamant that while their diction may have been haphazard, the sentiment was clear.
“Wareme is completely inept,” smoldered Handel, whose Attack on Titan hoodie showed clear tear stains. “Do you know how hard I’ve worked on learning Japanese for this class? I put in the time maybe five, six minutes a day to stay fresh with sentence structure, and then a solid hour of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure for ‘immersion therapy’ learning. But you know what? I’ve had it up to here [Green lifts their hand above their forehead, unleashing an avalanche of crumbs]. I promise, Wareme will feel my wrath just as soon as I get my vocab and grammar down.”
Other professors, like German-language Professor Fotze Schamlippen, shared similarly baffling queries from his students.
“This meek, impish boy arrives, lingering outside my office,” began Schamlippen, gesturing to the door. “Finally, I greet him with a customary ‘kommen,’ to which he replied, ‘sorry, I hate getting walked in on too.’ Finally the context set in and he entered, and proceeded to prod me incessantly about the ‘cuttlefish draperies.’ He slunk out, silently, after I informed him that kambodschanische means ‘Cambodian,’ not ‘body camera.’”
Another professor, Farsi’s Kos Cunam, shared similar disbelief at the ire imparted by students during lecture.
“I was referring to a set of slides about Cyrus and his cylinder of rights,” Cunam explained, “when one of my intermediate students interrupted with her desire that I ‘arise the cone from my down mouth.’ I was deeply confused, and asked them to elaborate, to which they only replied ‘standard malice thunder uncle,’ and mimed a mic-drop.”
Language-learning students everywhere have taken a stance against heavy workloads, inconsistent schedules, and unforgiving deadlines, but their complaints have been seemingly lost in translation.
“Maybe I’m just getting old, but I have no idea what my students are saying these days,” Spanish professor Mierda Culo explained. “For instance, one of my students wrote to me that answering questions in front of the class made her feel ‘muy embarazada.’ I definitely stopped calling on her after that.”
While some onlookers say that actually studying and practicing can make the classes easier for language learners, students have resorted to much easier means of getting their work done.
“I thought one of my students was a star pupil,” attests Chinese professor Yīndào Yīnhù, “That was until they submitted one of their homework assignments starting off with ‘As an AI language-learning model…’”
When pressed for comment, a representative of the Student Language Learners Club needed to have the question repeated, slowly, several times, and then finally restated in English.
Image by Konstantin Postumitenko via DepositPhotos
This was pretty funny to read! I mean, these students are language “learners”, so of course they are going to make mistakes, but the way they made mistakes definitely gave me a chuckle. Yeah, I imaging lots of language students are just getting by in their classes by using an AI program rather than actually doing the studying themselves. That’s what happens when students are forced to take classes because they are required rather than because the student actually has any interest in the subject. Before AI there was paper mills and homework “helpers”, aka students that would do your homework for you for a fee. I made pretty good money doing other people’s homework! Even if AI was completely outlawed, students would find another way to get out of studying.