When what is said is nonsensical, it's TOEFL

December 27, 2003

Shortly after New Year's Day 1988, our family embarked on a Yangtze River boat for the trip upstream from Shanghai to Chengdu.

It took six days, and because the boat was delayed by fog, we passed through the Three Gorges in the dead of night. Yes, it was interesting to watch them steer this enormous boat using two searchlights focused on the lines where the sheer cliffs disappeared into the black water, but we sort of wanted to see the Three Gorges.

One reason the trip took so long was that the boat stopped at every village and town. Hundreds of Chinese got on, or got off, at each stop, and the boat's kitchens stocked up on supplies, including the local brew.

After one such stop, my son Peter, then 15, came back to our cabin after playing cards with the Chinese passengers in the second-class lounge. (There was no first-class lounge. This was a proper Communist riverboat.) We'd been wondering why the label on the beer bottle had a picture of a seal, since the hamlet where we bought it was around 2,000 kilometers from the ocean. But Peter hadn't seen the label and didn't know that, which is why he asked, "What do seals have to do with beer?"

A perfectly reasonable question, given the circumstances, but quite possibly a sentence never before spoken in the history of English.

That year I was teaching a class for students preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which they had to take in order to be admitted to American universities, and I'd noticed that the dialog they studied didn't sound at all like real people talking. So we named our newly-discovered category of highly improbable things someone actually said TOEFL sentences.

Here are a couple (spoilers at end):

a) How do you weaponize the mosquito?

b) Do you want flames or a denuded forest?

c) These findings predict a level of gymnastic ability that is rare among proteins.

The kind of stilted sentences my students were learning are often called "Effle," apparently from the phrase "English as a Foreign Language," as I read recently from posts on language log.com, a Web log for linguists.

Geoffrey Pullum, of the University of California at Santa Cruz, describes Effle as meaningless English from textbooks, "awkward and stupid-sounding English example sentences made up without regard for whether anyone would ever want to say anything like that."

Effle sentences are meaningful enough, said Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania, "but they have a sort of artificial feeling, like not-quite-real computer-generated movie scenes." I sent Liberman my modest collection of TOEFL sentences, which he was kind enough to post. He calls them "high-entropy," which is nice.

The trouble with studying a foreign language is not only that you learn to say things you'll probably never want to, but also that you won't learn how to say things you do want to, and I'm not talking about obscenities.

"It always ticked me off," Berkeley linguist John McWhorter said in his post about Effle, "that after God-knows-how-many years of French classes I had no idea how to say 'That tastes like chicken,' 'Get your feet off of there' or 'Stick out your tongue.' "

It's easy enough to pick up new vocabulary when you need it, he said, "but what about 'even' as in 'I even had a purple one' or 'smells like'?"

Students should be taught everyday necessities like "Put that down" or "Go all the way to the end," he suggests, along with "Might as well" and "You'll get over it."

The classes in Chinese I took before we went to China were much more along those lines, and thus more useful, than the "plume de ma tante" French I studied in high school. Peter, who studied Chinese all the year we were in Shanghai, said his class didn't start to make progress until the instructor threw away the textbook - Chiffle? - and got the students started telling stories and jokes they then had to explain.

Anyway -- and what does someone mean who starts a sentence with "anyway?" -- here's how the TOEFL sentences above happened.

a) Me to a scientist talking about the practicality of using malaria as a biological weapon.

b) One of our editors asking another what photograph he should use to illustrate a story about forest fires.

c) From a Feb. 13 Nature magazine article about how proteins fold.

Happy New Year, and good listening.