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When you're saying goodbye to someone who's about to go to class and you want to tell them to have a good time in class, can you simply say "have a nice class"? My native language is Portuguese and I thought it was fine to say this, but my American friend told me it doesn't sound right.

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  • Did they say why they thought it didn't sound right?
    – KillingTime
    Commented Nov 21, 2019 at 19:06
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    It's a matter of idiomaticity, not grammaticality. "Have a nice day" is fine, especially in the States (it tends to cloy if used over-familiarly in the UK). "Have a nice holiday / trip / walk / Easter / Christmas / meal" are fine. But "Have a nice class / lecture / exam / drive (borderline) / game" just don't work.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Nov 21, 2019 at 19:21
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    They said they didn't know why it didn't sound right and just told me to say "have fun in class" instead. It was a long time ago and I'm just now wondering about it.
    – Daniela Moraes
    Commented Nov 21, 2019 at 19:22
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    While it's not a common idiom, I think you can put almost anything in the "Have a nice X" pattern, in informal conversation.
    – Barmar
    Commented Nov 21, 2019 at 20:11
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    We usually wish someone "Have a nice/good..." of something that's expected to be enjoyable, as in @EdwinAshworth's list, rather than something routine like a class or a journey to work. But if you want to wish your friend a good time in class, there's no reason why you shouldn't.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Nov 22, 2019 at 9:49

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It's grammatically correct and doesn't strike me (a native speaker from Illinois) as odd. It's nowhere near as common as things like "have a nice day" or "have a good trip" are, but I wouldn't find it at all strange if someone said it to me. Now that I'm thinking about it, my intuition tells me that "Have a good class" would be slightly better, but the difference to me is not a very important one.

I confess that I'm not necessarily able to justify this stance, though. It's tough to check this using Google because "have a nice/good class" results in hits like "I have a nice/good class. Everyone is friendly" and other things that are not what we need. It's also tough to check it using a corpus search because it's such a specific phrase to look for. In COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) I found no instances of "Have a nice class" and only one instance of "Have a good class"--and that one example is (a) kind of weird and (b) comes from an author who appears to be a non-native speaker residing in Turkey. Here is the example:

In the observations and interviews conducted, it was seen that the initial verbal stimuli used by most teachers at the beginning of class to grab students' attention included the same greetings everyday [sic]: 'Hello children, good morning, stand up, sit down, have a good class'.

(If teachers are saying that to their own students about the class that they, the teachers, are about to teach, that's strange.)

For what it's worth, when someone asked about "Have a good class" in a similar forum see here), the native speakers seemed to feel iffy about it, at best. One person suggests that "Enjoy your class" would be better, but I share the intuition of the other person who disagrees and says that that option (kind of) sounds sarcastic. This is possibly because it sounds a little formal compared to "Have a good/nice X."

I somehow still personally feel that "Have a good class" is fine and is the best option or that it's a tie between "Have a good class" and "Have a nice class". I dislike relying on intuition and I'd feel more confident if I could find examples uttered by native speakers, but it's not something that's likely to show up in a corpus. Even MICASE (the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, consisting of data collected at the University of Michigan) focuses on things like class meetings and study sessions. "Have a good class" is something you're likely to say during hallway chitchat with a friend right as before their class begins--a situation unlikely to be recorded even when you have linguists running around the school collecting data. This might remain a mystery, then.

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The reason this doesn't quite sound natural, I think, is that with "Have a nice X", X is usually a period of time.

Eg with "Have a nice day", "I hope you have a nice time", "Have a nice holiday!" etc, "day", "time" and "holiday" are used in the sense of the period of time. (see also the insulting "Have a nice life" which means "I don't want to ever see you again")

Some of these words have multiple senses in which they can be used: "Holiday" for example can be used to describe a two-week period where you're not in work, or it can be used to describe the specific thing that you did, eg go to Spain. "Have a nice holiday" refers to the time period sense of the word.

The word "class" doesn't as easily fit into this usage. Yes, the class will last for a certain period of time (an hour, say), but we don't usually refer to the time period itself using the word "class", which refers more to the activity - what you do in the time.

"Enjoy the class!" would be a more natural thing to say, as they're (hopefully) enjoying the activity, rather than the time period.

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  • "Have a nice holiday" is probably ambiguously referencing the time / the activities envisaged.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Aug 18, 2020 at 14:09
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I don't see anything wrong with it. Have a nice first day at work. Have a nice holiday. Have a nice nap. Have a nice class. (American English)

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