In teaching my photography workshop, I ran across an unexpected problem. Not with the teaching. Not with ideas about photography.

No, the problem was with English.

Since I am teaching the class in English, some of my students wanted to tell me — in English — that they had used the flash on their camera to complete their homework assignment.

In other words, they wanted to say that they’d used something like the little light on the left of the camera in this image:

Camera with a built-in Flash (photo from Wikimedia commons)

Now, if I were saying it in English myself, I’d probably say that “I used the flash” or I might talk about the “light from the flash”.

However, what my students said was that they had used the “flashlight”.

Now, if you’re an American reading this, you’ll know right away a “flashlight” refers to something completely different from the thing that’s used in a camera. It refers to this:

An American “Flashlight” (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

However, according to my online German-British English dictionary, it turns out that in British English you can call the thing on a camera a “flashlight”.

I assume that must be because in Britain they call an American “flashlight” a “torch.” But of course, for me, an American, a “torch” always means something like this:

The kind of thing this American calls a “torch” (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

I’m sure that you have caught on to my problem in a flash, eh? 😉 (Sorry, couldn’t resist that). Anyway, the problem is that  my students call a “flash,” a “flashlight,” and a “flashlight”, a “torch,” since they learned British English and I learned American English.

Make no mistake, my students all speak English better than I speak German.  And it’s still easier for me to teach the workshop in English, rather than in German.

But I sometimes find the British English words to be as much as a foreign language to me as German. What can help in those instances is to use my German-British English dictionary to figure out the meaning of an British-English word in German. Odd, perhaps, but it actually works pretty well.

Now, how did I figure out that this approach would help?

Well, that bit of inspiration came to me in a flash.

But of course. 😉