Now that I have regular science classes I have to teach, I’m back to teaching about planets once again. Except in higher levels, most of my students didn’t have electronic dictionaries in class. Now due to the heavy “translate the vocabulary” style requirements of learning a science in a foreign language, a good number of students are able to look up new words quickly when they need extra help. Students can use their phones, or stand alone electronic dictionaries to look up anything I might say in class.
I was helping student say the word “Uranus” once again without having them pronounce it as “Your anus” in English. Of course, not of my students knew what an “anus” was. I told them to look it up, which lead to the entire class bursting out in tears of laughter. The Korean word is “Hang-mun” (항문) (Hanja: 肛門).
One of the cool things about Korean dictionaries is that if a word has a Chinese root (70%+ do), then they print the Chinese characters next to the words in the dictionary. This is needed because there are so many homonyms in Korean. It just so happens that I knew the Hanja (Chinese character) of one of the syllables of the word. The “mun” (문) of “Hang-mun” is the character for the word “door” (門) (It’s a pictogram.)
So, what did that other Chinese character mean? Since middle school students study Chinese characters intensely, I sought one out. First, I showed them the character for “door”. “I know what this means.” I told them.
Then I showed them the first set of Chinese characters,”肛”, and told them “This is pronounced ‘Hang‘. What does it mean?” The students didn’t understand until I showed them the the Korean word that comes from the Chinese characters,(항문) “Hang-mun“. What would you do if your foreign teacher demanded a serious answer about a word that immature? Then they simply laughed like the elementary school children and asked why I needed to know what the word meant. Since I didn’t have a good reason, I just told them how it happened to be a topic in class and I wanted to figure it out for myself instead.
Today I solved the answer to my satisfaction. One student brought a brand new electronic dictionary to class. He was telling me it could do English, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, and it had handwriting recognition too. He was showing me all the really cool features, so I looked up the word again, then selected the Chinese characters and looked THOSE up in the Chinese to Korean dictionary.
The word ended up meaning, according to his dictionary, “The door of the ass”, which is way, way funny. Now I can laugh in three languages about that word.
