The Princess and Seven Small Men

It may seem like an exaggeration to say that I spend about 20% of every class just trying to understand what it is that the students are saying, but it's no lie. Just to start things off they mumble, look at the floor while they talk, and seem dead set against repeating them selves under any circumstance, but that's not the worst of it. The two biggest factors limiting my communication with them is their accents and their unwillingness to explain themselves. To begin with it feels like I miss one out of every five words because I can't hear it through their accent. There are actually times when I'm about to correct them for using Chinese when I realize they're just talking in garbled English. The problem with their accent is that they like to run over consonants sounds like R and V and some T's. On top of that they love to make three of four syllable words into one long mess Ferrari is pretty hard to understand said all at once with weak R's. On top of that they hate to stop and think of other words to explain something. If they say a movie title and I don't understand it it takes forever to get them to give me some sense of what the movie is about. Today was just the perfect example of that phenomenon. I had them come up with examples of things that were fiction and things that were nonfiction, since they didn't really seem to understand the concept. Besides a few snags like one girl insisting that Superman was in some way nonfiction things were going fine. Some of the students would come up with Chinese novels as examples of fiction, which was fine as long as they tried to explain what it was about a little. One student near the back of the room came up with The Princess and Seven Small Men. Now there are plenty of Chinese books I don't know so I was about to ask what it was about when one of the more advanced students blurted out the real name, if you haven't guessed it yet take a moment and think about it, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.