On My Way To Korea

People say the funniest things when they learn languages don’t they?  Well, I’m no different.  Last time I explained mistakes that Koreans commonly make when speaking English so I decided I needed to tell on of my mistakes (I only made one right…)

While teaching a teenage girl (making it even more embarrassing) I made the mistake of trying to say spiritual (we do spiritual things on Sunday) but instead said sexual.  Both roots have the same spelling so you have to make sure you use them the right way.

Enjoy!

English Transcript

Hi everyone, since I talked about mistakes Koreans make speaking English last time, this time I’ll talk about a mistake I made when I first learned Korean.

I was a missionary when I first learned Korean, so I learned a lot of church words. And since I learned Chinese I really liked characters. So when I learned ‘church’, seung-gyung, I learned seung. That seung means holy. And if you add ‘cheug-in’ to a character then it changes from a noun into an adjective. So, I put together ‘seung’ and ‘cheug-in’ I thought it would mean ‘spiritual.’

Later while I was teaching as a missionary, a girl asked me a question. She asked what people do on Sunday when they go to church. I said that people go to church and do sexual things.

That’s a big mistake, eh?

The problem is that there are two ‘seung’ characters, a ‘seung’ meaning holy and a ‘seung’ meaning sex. If you say ‘seung-cheug-in’, it’s the ‘seung’ meaning sex. If you want to say spiritual, you need to use ‘geu-rook-han.’

Maybe when she heard that, she was thinking ‘Huh? Is this a pervert church?’ Or maybe ‘I should join…’ I have no idea what she was thinking, but please make sure not to make a mistake like that!