La mujer era persiana ....

Another intermediate student wrote in a story,

"La mujer era persiana."

I automatically crossed out the "i" and the final "-na", assuming that the student meant to say, "The woman was Persian" and went with the false cognate rather than looking it up to find that it should be "persa."

Then, of course, I stopped, because I realized that the woman being "Persian" made no sense - not an adjective commonly used by modern middle-American college students except when talking about cats, or perhaps Jake Gyllenhaal's recent movie stint as the Prince of Persia. Do they even know that Persia is another name for Iran?

So, more pondering, more re-reading - and then it hit me what the student was trying to say:

"The woman was blind."

A Personal Favorite - You've Gotta Love Literal Translation

I've been in US Spanish classrooms as a student, teacher, and professor for over 30 years now. In that time I've heard and read a lot of unintentionally funny student errors. One particularly memorable one from an intermediate student's short story about a man getting lost as he drove across the desert:

"Carlos bajó del coche y tomó un ganso."

This sentence stopped me dead - "What goose?!", I thought. "Where did a goose come from in the middle of the desert? Where did he take it from? The back seat? The trunk?"

I re-read the story from the beginning, but nope - not a single goose was mentioned before this sentence. I stared at the sentence some more, I asked some other professors, and no one had the slightest idea what the student was trying to say. Finally I went to the dictionary, thinking that "ganso" must have some obscure alternate meaning that the student had stumbled onto by accident. And then my mental light bulb finally switched on:

"Carlos got out of the car and took a gander."