Quote of the week

"I hate four and six because four means death and six is the devil's number."

I think my tutor student is going to provide a wealth of quotes. To unpack this one a bit: in the Chinese-Korean hybrid numbers the number four sounds like the Korean word for 'death' (the six part we know about, but I can't capture the facial expression and hand gestures that went with it to convey 'devil'). Today he had another toy dinosaur with him (so far there's been a velociraptor and a pterodactyl), and we talked about international incidents, which is amusing enough of a topic with a nine year old, and even funnier when he doesn't know all the words he needs. He got the story through to me anyway, though: a South Korean hiker went to climb a mountain that she thought was South of the border but which was actually North of the 38th parallel, and a North Korean border guard killed her thinking that she was trying to infiltrate the country.

I'm realizing that these quotes need some context in terms of the consistent oddities of my students' English. The older kids write weekly journals (theoretically), and this would be a prototypical essay "Yesterday I go to roller coaster. It was excited and very funny. Yesterday was happy."

My favorite story of a student at my school misunderstanding English is the case of Tiger. All the students here are assigned English names when they first arrive, and one of the kids was dubbed 'Ryan'. Ryan's best friend thought that the name was 'Lion', and he wanted to be an animal too so he insisted that his name be Tiger. Most of the students are pretty good at distinguishing L and R, but the newest students have some trouble. Even so, I've only been called 'Randon' once or twice. 'Roren' and 'Rindsey' weren't as fortunate for some reason. I wonder if my inability to audibly differentiate between some Korean letters leads to anything as humorous as the Lion/Ryan mistake, or even as funny as the Rindsey Rohan t-shirt I saw (Yes, in print. I kid you not. The t-shirt only got better from there.)