Another tea-time and another round of giggles. I’ve kind of adopted three girls as my conversation partners—my actual Jia Yong, my tutee Jia Moon, Somina Park, and sometimes my other conversation partner Fatih Atay, or as he likes to call himself, Frank! I love interacting with them together because they all come from the same country, but you can see their personalities shine and even their regional or familial cultural differences by way of attitude and their understanding of words in different ways. We talked a lot about, what I now know, is called minimal pairs. They had some unfortunate accidents with them—of course, the “page” versus “sheet” of paper phenomenon was pretty universal for them. But then there were others of some pretty explicit words that people mistook them for saying! It was hilarious, because of course it was young people who understood them wrong, but I suppose if an older or more reserved person had heard that, they may have been offended. We talked about that, and about annunciating things clearer. We also talked about some funny words in Korean, as they all are Korean. They asked me to say something in Italian, so I told them, "Ciao, bella!" Which is hello, beautiful in Italian. But they mistook ME for saying an offensive word in Korean that is "chabela!" or something (I just don't know!), that means to hit in the face and smash around. That was their best description of it--to smash into someones face or into a table. It was a threat, almost! But, we laughed because it was exactly what they had done earlier with their friend, and the mistaken words, but in their own language. So, we all came full circle!
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