Friday, July 9, 2010

Way Back When Wednesday - Going through the moon

It's difficult to get a classroom of teenage students talking.  Especially when it's co-ed.  The middle and high schools in Sokcho are all boys or all girls, so they get paranoid when they were together and had to speak English out loud in my class.

So I usually went along with whatever they wanted to talk about.  In one of my middle school aged classes, there was a boy who wasn't too shy.  His name was Seon-Oong.  He was great and would talk to me about a lot of things.

This day he was telling me about one of his computer games.  How he had to go down this hall and through the moon, but it was a mystery what was behind it, so it was scary.  I sort of smiled at this.  I guess you could call this a "pun."  He used a Korean word in this story instead of the correct English word, but the Korean word sounds like a different English word.  Can you guess what it was?  It was moon!  In Korean, "moon (문)" means "door."

I asked him, "you had to go through the moon?"  At first he didn't get it, and responded with a why-are-you-asking-me-this type of answer.  So I asked again, "Are you sure you went through the moon," putting a little more stress on the erring word.  And then he got it.  He laughed and corrected himself.  Going though the moon seemed a bit out of context.

Funny how some Korean words sound just like English!

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