“Are you doing your homework?” “Yea, reviewing the cartoon!” Let’s see if you can recognize it. After the familiar title page and music fades out, a grey cat is seen laying on a couch while listening to the radio. Suddenly, loud noise in the other room disturbs his rest and he goes into the kitchen to see a brown mouse placing food on a homemade slide that leads into his hole in the wall. The cat then gets very upset and unleashes his wrath in the direction of the mouse, except he seems to hit and break everything in the room EXECPT the mouse. Sound familiar? That’s right, it’s the Saturday morning classic “Tom and Jerry.” This morning, for the second time in our training, we have used these two characters as part of our language learning.
How does that work? Well, the first time we watched an episode called “The Flying Cat.” After watching it, our teacher then retold the story in Amharic while we recorded it. Then, we played the story back and stopped it whenever something was unclear. That same routine was the plan for this morning, but wanting an extra challenge, we requested that the story be recorded without us seeing the episode first. It was much more fun to listen to our teacher describe what only he saw on the screen meanwhile trying to imagine it in our minds. Then after a replay of our teacher’s rendition and working through the text, we all watched the episode together. It’s a fun exercise in which we learn a lot of words for “punching, falling, crashing, shoving, squashing, etc.”
There are a few funny linguistic things present in “Tom and Jerry”. First of all, Jerry is a girl because in Amharic anything small and “cute” is always spoken of as feminine. I can’t wait for an episode when Jerry meets a beautiful female mouse! Second, the word for “to punch” in Amharic is a fun English adaption. “Be-bahks meta” literally means “with - closed fist he hit.” The word I transliterated as “bahks” is really the English word “box” as in a boxing match. Finally, we learned that when someone throws a tomato in someone else’s face (how else could we have learned such valuable vocabulary?), the correct way to say it is “be timatim fitu lai letafetchu” which literally means “with tomato face his on she stuck it” (or more naturally “she (remember Jerry is a girl) stuck the tomato on his face). Whenever we come to a new idea, we try to guess at the right verb to use. In this case, I would have never chosen the word “letafe” whose primary usage would be to stick a paper or sign onto a wall. But, nevertheless, Jerry stuck the tomato on Tom’s face. Now I can only hope that this unexpected usage STICKS in my mind so that if we ever watch the Three Stooges in class, it will come in very handy.
How does that work? Well, the first time we watched an episode called “The Flying Cat.” After watching it, our teacher then retold the story in Amharic while we recorded it. Then, we played the story back and stopped it whenever something was unclear. That same routine was the plan for this morning, but wanting an extra challenge, we requested that the story be recorded without us seeing the episode first. It was much more fun to listen to our teacher describe what only he saw on the screen meanwhile trying to imagine it in our minds. Then after a replay of our teacher’s rendition and working through the text, we all watched the episode together. It’s a fun exercise in which we learn a lot of words for “punching, falling, crashing, shoving, squashing, etc.”
There are a few funny linguistic things present in “Tom and Jerry”. First of all, Jerry is a girl because in Amharic anything small and “cute” is always spoken of as feminine. I can’t wait for an episode when Jerry meets a beautiful female mouse! Second, the word for “to punch” in Amharic is a fun English adaption. “Be-bahks meta” literally means “with - closed fist he hit.” The word I transliterated as “bahks” is really the English word “box” as in a boxing match. Finally, we learned that when someone throws a tomato in someone else’s face (how else could we have learned such valuable vocabulary?), the correct way to say it is “be timatim fitu lai letafetchu” which literally means “with tomato face his on she stuck it” (or more naturally “she (remember Jerry is a girl) stuck the tomato on his face). Whenever we come to a new idea, we try to guess at the right verb to use. In this case, I would have never chosen the word “letafe” whose primary usage would be to stick a paper or sign onto a wall. But, nevertheless, Jerry stuck the tomato on Tom’s face. Now I can only hope that this unexpected usage STICKS in my mind so that if we ever watch the Three Stooges in class, it will come in very handy.
How fun! Ethan and Caleb love Tom and Jerry (they often give me the play by play after watching it, too, but in English -of course!). That cartoon moves pretty fast, it must keep you on your toes!
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