Story Time (Pt. 2)!
Gather round, friends, for an amusing story about my most embarrassing language fail yet!
So, for the past few weeks, my language exchange partner and I have been reading Aesop’s fables in Korean to help me with my studies. Usually this involves me dazzling my language exchange partner with a well paced and coherent opening sentence that quickly devolves as the story continues. For this particular day, we were reading Aesop’s fable about a very greedy dog who wanted a larger piece of meat to eat and ran across the following line:
“저 개의 고기가 내 고기보다 훨씬 크잖아.”
This line (loosely) translates to mean: “That dog’s meat is much larger than my meat.” (For context: the dog is looking at his reflection and thinks that his reflection is a real dog with a larger piece of meat in its mouth.)
However, when I got to this line and read it out loud, I said the following:
“저 게이의 고기가 내 고기보다 훨씬 크잖아.”
Which loosely means “That gay person’s meat is much larger than my meat.”
Needless to say, once my (infinitely patient) language exchange partner gently pointed out my mistake, I was super embarrassed and apologized profusely for creating a sentence that sounds a bit suggestive in English. That’s when my language exchange partner helpfully informed me that in fact, I was just half a mispronunciation away from saying the following:
“저 게이의 거기가 내 거기보다 훨씬 크잖아.” (where “거기” can be slang for a very particular part of the male anatomy, if you will.)
So yes; I very nearly said “That gay person’s ~meat~ is much larger than my ~meat~.” (Cue me simultaneously wanting to melt into a puddle out of embarrassment but also finding this whole situation incredibly funny.)
So remember, friends: always check your pronunciation! It’s important!! But more importantly, remember that it’s okay to make mistakes!! If I can utter these words out loud to a native speaker and not get immediately banned from speaking the Korean language, then I promise, you can make mistakes, too! So in the words of Ms. Frizzle:
Study well, y’all!!