In last week`s reading lesson with first year high school students, as always I read the text too many times to count, and a read and re-read difficult passages and words. On only one out of two birthday cakes I was received this year was my name spelled correctly...the other two were "Emiry" (one of these misspelled cakes was from my school office staff who deal with all my housing, bills, bank account and immigration stuff, so surely they`ve seen my name written many many times). Given these orthographic stumbling blocks, you can imagine "muscular dystrophy" presented a predictable challenge.
So among other words and phrases like "made fun of him" and "illness," my teacher had me model "muscular dystrophy" over and over and over again. You know how things start to sound kind of silly when repeated too often, or simply when explaining things aloud you never gave much thought to before (like the fact that some people in my high school posed with their hunting rifles in their senior yearbook pictures, or that my brother and his boss carved up a deer and had venison consume all their freezer space after hitting it with his truck)? In a similar vein, the following occurred:
Emily: Muscular dystrophy.
Students: Mus-cu-ra dyso-tlo-fee.
Emily: Muscular dystrophy.
Students: Muscu-ra dee-sto-ro-fee.
Emily: Muscular dystrophy!
Students: Muscula dysto-ro-fee.
Emily: MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY!!!!!!!
etc.
Most kids can`t tell me what they did last weekend. I would be delighted to find a situation in which a typical Japanese student would need to know and correctly pronounce "muscular dystrophy." My inbox would happily welcome any suggestions.