When the Teacher Strikes Back

I came across this image on WeChat:

The original image was written in traditional characters. Here’s a simplified Chinese transcript:

学生：老师你教的都

是没有用的东西

。

老师：我不许你这样

说自己。

Don’t feel bad if you don’t get it at first. Some native speakers even take a second to figure out what happened.

This is a case of syntactic ambiguity. You can interpret the first statement in two ways, and it’s all because the verb 教, meaning “to teach,” can take two objects: who is being taught (what we think of as a “indirect object” in English) and what is being taught (what we think of as a “direct object” in English).

The other key is that in Chinese, 没有用的东西 (literally, “useless things”) can also refer to people.

So the joke is that when the student says “everything you teach is useless,” the teacher flips it around and interprets it as “everyone you teach is useless.” Then the teacher pretends to take the high road and says, “I won’t let you talk about yourself that way.”