Ghanaian English

Here’s more Ghanaian English for ya:

While writing (taking) a class tests, my students always say “Madam, please, you are blocking my view” when I stand in front of them while invigilating (monitoring) so that they can’t see the board.

Me last week: Abba! (exclamation which asks why and at the same time shows frusteration) I couldn’t sleep well because of lights off (power out) last night while it was 100 degrees. (Sidenote: sleeping without a fan one night in this heat was awful but then I think about some of my friends here who don’t have electricity at all and I stop my complaining!)

Someone talking about a friend taking her baby to the hospital: The baby is always sick. She has a what? Disease. So she had to take her to what? The hospital. (the rhetorical questioning really confused me at first because I thought maybe people couldn’t think of the word. So I’d try to help out and pipe up with an answer until then I realized it was just type of conversational technique.)

During an interview we held with a student who is applying for the post of sports prefect:

Teacher: Are you good at playing football?

Student: I can play football somehow. (somewhat)

And a few funnies from marking a class test last week. Since I sometimes teach small health lessons during my ICT time, I decided to test the students on a couple of health topics, especially since I even had them copy notes. First I asked for one sign/symptom of Cerebro Spinal Meningitis (CSM). Two interesting responses:

Drool (have NO idea where she got that from)

Eye colour to change lick (I think he meant like) yellow

Then I asked about when it’s important to wash your hands and several people misspelled soap by writing soup instead. I’m just really hoping that they didn’t misunderstand me and are now washing their hands with soup before eating. Also saw many interesting spellings of toilet.