Reading student essays

At the end of their 13th year of school, German students have to take what's called an Abitur. It's a sort of final exam and a university entrance exam rolled into one. Of course the students tend to freak out about it, since it counts for so much, and they start preparing early. The class at my school took a practice English essay exam on Tuesday, and their teacher asked me if I could go through about 20 or 30 essays and just comment on grammar and language, and see if there were any particular points of grammar or style that needed a lot of work before next spring. (Note: I'm not allowed to grade papers - that's restricted to the teachers - so I was really doing more of what I did at the writing center at school, which was to read over papers and suggest how they could be improved, without evaluating them).

So I spent several hours Wednesday and yesterday reading through the exams. Unlike foreign language instuction in the U.S. (I'll probably post about this later, since I've been thinking a lot about it lately), German schools expect their students to actually learn something, so by the time students are ready to go to college, their English is pretty good. Their task was to read an English excerpt and answer some questions about it, and then to read a German excerpt and condense it into so many English words.

In both sections, I could understand nearly everything they meant, but there were obviously things that clued the reader into the fact that they're not native speakers. Now, I don't mean the following to be malicious - I've had to write a few German essays, and I'm sure they contained several ridiculous expressions that must have forced many a rueful sigh and a question mark in the margin from the teacher. But it's interesting to me to see the mistakes that people make when they're obviously thinking in one language and trying to express themselves in another.

In German, all nouns are capitalized. So are adjectives that are made into nouns. In English, for example, instead of saying "the homeless people," we can just say "the homeless," making the adjective into a noun. In German, "homeless" is "obdachlos," so the German equivalent of "the homeless" is "die Obdachlosen."

So, in the English story, one of the characters is described as becoming depressed and gaining weight when he can't find a job. So a lot of the German students wrote about a character who "cannot find a job and becomes a Fat Man."

Is anyone else tempted to think that this character has run off and become the Fat Man in the Circus?