UHC Mongolia

So I'm teaching English at Santis. I have a level 2 class (of 7 levels) of adults, and by adult I mean 15 years old and up. Most of the students are high school/college age, and I have two students who have families of their own. All of them are great - I even have a class clown (one of my older students even!!!). So far everything is going well with them, their English is good enough that they can ask me questions usually if they need to, and that's a huge help. However, a few things get lost in translation ... like names.

Most of my students (save for the Brazillian woman) have very beautiful Tibetan names. And since Mongolians only go by one name, not a first name and a surname like westerners, their names are quite long. To make this easier on everyone, myself included, they usually go by a shorter name. So when I asked them to write their names on their homework, they usually put the short name/nickname on it. Since I've managed to learn which name goes with which person (whether or not I can say the long OR the short name correctly), this hasn't been a problem.

However ... I noticed that one student had written "HellHero" on the front of his book, and then wrote "Hell" at the top of this homework as his short name. Obviously, this seemed odd to me. So I asked him if he knew what "Hell" meant. To my surprise, he told me yes. Apparently "Hell Hero" is the name of a videogame that he plays, and since it isn't uncommon for male names in Mongolia to end with "baatar", which means "hero" or "warrior", it seemed natural to him that "Hell" would be a good nickname.

So I asked the class if everyone knew what "Hell" actually meant in an English-speaking context. "What the hell?" was the response I got. So first I had to explain that "What the hell?" was an extremely informal phrase, so much so that they shouldn't say it at all just so that no one could turn around to possibly an English speaking parent or superior and say "But my teacher at Santis taught it to me."

After the slang definition of "hell" I tried to teach them the literal meaning ... which is hard when you're in a room full of Buddhists who don't have enough English to discuss something as abstract as religion. I don't think they fully understood me, but what else was I to do :P