I had the students make recipes. It was a rush to explain to them how to write a recipe, and I basically did a terrible job of it, so it wasn't surprising they didn't all come out great. Many were just simple spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes and the occasional cookie or cake made with "flower", but I also had some pretty amusing submissions, which I will post here.
Fortunately the names weren't within frame, but my hand's shadow is and a few of the shots are really blurry. I never asked the students if I could post their homework online (because that'd be weird thing to ask), so hopefully I'm not breaking any laws or embarrassing anyone or anything.
Omerice is a Japanese dish: a portmanteau (as many Japanese words are) of omelet and rice. Should it be spelled as a portmanteau or as romanization of the Japanese it comes from? That's for society to decide. There are other routes as well, however, romanizing and combining with German spelling is probably not the way to go. Also, shir-frying calots can be dangerous.
Getting the right verb you need can be tricky.
Plurality can be difficult for people not used to it. Also worth noting that when given the option of spelling "fry" wrong, students go for "fly" at least 90% of the time.
This student did manage to spell "fry" right (though use it incorrectly), and has created some mysterious substance which shall not be named (apparently).
For whatever reason, one of the hardest things I faced was getting students to not write their names using Japanese characters. Not looking up how to spell something is already baffling to me, but this student didn't even know the word at all. And didn't even try to write it using English characters.
Some flower cookies.
While the bulk of the recipes were pretty terrible (many of them did better than I would have, so I'm not saying anything about them),
there were a few that were just amazing.
The Japanese have a tendency to append everything with "Japanese". One of the people at the mochi-making thing tried explaining all the food they had there in a similar fashion: "This is Japanese mochi. This is Japanese daikon. This is Japanese chopsticks. This is Japanese hamburger." It is worth noting, as with this next recipe, that "Japanese" doesn't mean it is somehow different from any other version of the same thing, or even that it has anything to do with Japan or the Japanese people at all, it seems to merely mean that the Japanese people are aware of its existence in their country.
Counters can be a difficult part of the Japanese language. I remember reading in a book of mine about a German telling a Japanese person how difficult counters are, to which he replied that German (and English) have them as well. This recipe, however, does not.
A bit hard to see, and I drew over it, but if my pancakes turned Gord[o]n Brown, I'd be impressed.
Really blurry, but a few of the essays ended with letting me know they are over.
Or included flair.
This essay also asks me to do the impossible. Spelled right though.
And some essays included drawings.
Others tried to convince me of things. This "easy" recipe writer is rather inventive with language.
Along with l/r, a/u are commonly swapped letters.
Again the students had problems with counters. This one decided to just use Japanese.
A lot of students wrote about "hot sand", "cap ramen", and "capcakes", so I made or found these images which I clipped to their homework.
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I then gave the students all a chance to redo them after explaining a lot of common mistakes. These weren't as funny, but they were much better. Again, explaining what they did wrong, and what to fix and how, was rushed, but they somehow seemed to mostly understand the notes I wrote them at least.
I turned them into books and gave them 3 each per class (keeping one copy each for myself). I scanned all the recipes, but posting 161 students' homework would be both boring and probably not nice to the students, so I won't. I ended up spending a ton of money on them because I needed to buy more ink. The process of putting them together was more difficult than I thought it would be. I had also carefully given each class an even amount of top halves and bottom halves of the worksheet so I could combine them evenly, but because students never turned things in on time and just magic, sometimes I ended up with unevenness. Trying to explain to students in English that I need to know if they lost a top half or a bottom half so I could replace the right half without revealing my plans to make the books also turned out to be rather difficult.
I found some binders to put them in. I was lucky enough to find 4 of each color of the binder. I told the students to design a front page of their classes book, and the last page was just a sheet of white. I wanted to attach the covers better, but in the end, all I could come up with was tape. And while it lost some color hiding behind the plastic, I figured it would be better than getting beat up on the outside. I also made a table of contents. The works. It took students so long to get me their completed assignments, I was making them even after my farewell speech. I handed them to the teacher to give to them after break.
The actual homework submissions were more filled with art and color. I don't feel like going through all the 161 essays for more funny ones, but there were a few (as well as some wonderful drawings). Many of the students used the boxes I provided in the updated version of the sheet to draw wonderful drawings of what the food should look like.
Each class was supposed to make a cover like I said. Some classes understood the directions better than others it seemed.
In the end, the homework was fun to read, and I made something for them that I am probably more happy with than they are (though at great personal cost and frustration).
I am still always impressed with how the simple task of spell-checking is beyond them. I'm not sure what it is about the word "delicious", but, like "fry", it is consistently spelled wrong. For a people that fear mistakes so much to the point where even the teachers might not speak the language they choose as a career path in front of a native, that they won't invest the small effort it would take to check the spelling of something is surprising. If there is ever a pan Pokémon, I hope it is flying type.
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