The Perils Of Language

Much of second language acquisition is about taking risks.  You'll have a hard time mastering a language if you're afraid to experiment and improvise when your not sure how to say something.  This unfortunately means that sometimes be misunderstood, but when you learn what your mistake was, it'll very likely to stick.  Furthermore, its exhilirating when you are understood, even more so if you're told that you said it "correctly" (i.e., the meaning was clear and sounded natural).  So, experimenting not only creates verry effective opportunities for learning, it can be very motivating by showing you that you are learning and you can use what you're learning.

The mistakes you make can often be comical, so long as they don't result in a serious miscommunication.  An example of a "mistake" I made occured a few weeks ago.  I was chatting with one of my coworkers via text message.  He teaches Korean Literature and is one of the most fluent English speakers in the school (he reads English newspapers on a regular basis).  I was giving him my new phone number (having a smartphone in Korea makes life much easier, by the way).  He asked me to save his number.  I wanted to tell him that I had done it, so I replied "끝내요" (goon-nay-yo) with is the present tense, polite, informal form of the verb "to finish."  He asked me what I meant, so I explained that I meant that I had "finished" saving his number.  Then I asked if I had said it wrong.  He replied that 끝내요 means that "the relationship is finished."  I was mortified, especially because he's one of the teachers that I've become closest to among my coworkers (see my previous post here).  He hadn't taken offense, thankfully.  He knew he hadn't understood me.  He just said "It won't be easy for you to adjust to korean word cheer up" (sic).

I realized later that I should have used the word 하다 (ha-da), which essentially means "to do."  Using the past tense 했어요 (hay-seo-yo), instead of the present tense 해요 (hay-yo), would also have made it clearer.

Unfortunately, the idea that its okay to make mistakes is one of the hardest lessons to teach my students.  Americans, and I suspect people from most cultures, have a hard time grappling with the fact that making mistakes is a natural part of learning and growing.  But, in Korea that fear of making a mistakes is magnified many times over.  Making mistakes is often considered shameful, and so Korean students feel that anything they say in English, especially if its in front of their peers, has to be "right."  So, it can be quite hard to get them to say anything at all.