I recently told a friend of mine a joke about statisticians. I had read that joke in “Un matemático lee el periódico”, a Spanish translation of “A mathematician reads the newspaper”, months before. Today, while I was writing my diary, I asked myself “Why did I remember that joke?” Almost at the speed of light, it occurred to me jokes can be great for language learning, for the following reasons:
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They are funny, of course!
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Most of us, upon reading/listening to a joke, immediately want to tell it to another friend. So there is a social compulsion to memorize a joke, and thus all its words and general meaning.
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That social compulsion surpasses any language barrier. The joke about statisticians I told my friend had been translated into Spanish by the book’s translator, and I translated it into Italian on the fly, when needed. Might not jokes force us to use bilateral or trilateral connections (good workout!) in our brain to recount them?
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Jokes are generally short but not too much, easily remembered, sometimes use idiomatic expressions that can be easily explained, and surely have other great advantages, that I don’t feel like enumerating here
What do you think?
PS: At any rate, the joke about statisticians was the following:
Three statisticians go hunting. One of them sees a partridge flying, shoots at it, but misses it by two meters above. The second statistician misses it by two meters below. The third statistician exclaims: ‘We got it!’