In short, it was unplayable unless you were American. Eh. We tried. I attempted to play word games with him and still use the board to advance our pieces, but he decided that was "재미없어요"(jaemieobseo--boring). I muttered, "I'll jaemi your eobseo," under my breath, which is exactly the kind of thing my mother used to say to me when I was complaining, using whatever verb and noun I had most recently said: -"Mom! This popcorn is bland." -"I'll bland your popcorn." That usually confused me enough to stop all arguments.
Nice to know that I'm gradually starting to use every last mom-related speech pattern, right down to the one that didn't usually even make sense in English, and makes even less sense when you throw in Korean syllables. Seongyo didn't know what I was saying, and I didn't either.
Daesung snuck silently into class and stood behind me until I turned around and nearly got startled to death. he was positively gleeful that he actually surprised me.
Yosep came by later, and he's becoming a real favorite. This quiet kid that blended into the crowd and had no distinguishing characteristics was smiling and laughing and chattering up a storm today. It was like he'd been dipped in sunshine--I had no idea he could be so cheerful. He played endless rounds of the Korean-English word game with me:
We were both using my phone dictionary a lot, to check our spelling. I feel like we both learned a lot.
For a few minutes, I let Yosep play Minecraft on my phone while Seongyo looked up English songs he liked on the internet, then played them for me, Yosep, and Daesung. Daesung didn't really like having someone else in charge of providing the tunes, so he would turn on his phone sometimes before I'd remind him to let Seongyo pick songs for a while.
Seongyo also tried out some Englsih curse words today, just to see how they felt, I guess. I had to correct my boy and tell him not to say "역"(yeok---curses). Daesung doesn't know many English swears, so he kept asking what it was that Seongyo said wrong, thinking he had said something bad in Korean.
Also, after playing that perennial middle-school favorite song, "What Does the Fox Say?" Seongyo started using the phrase, minus the word "say". And he knows how to pronounce "fox" just fine but he was intentionally saying a different word. I went to the white board to write in hangul what "fox" was in Korean (여우--yeou) and what a certain English curse word was in Korean. They are not the same word. You can hear the difference between the two words, and the second isn't one you should use.
And this was part of the way that I learned that Yosep has a hilariously dry sense of humor. After I wrote on the board, he said in Korean, "Sem just cursed, she totally did. I saw it." I corrected, "No, 가르치다...I was teaching you." Yosep smiled over that. If I wasn't learning so much Korean, I'd miss all of Yosep's little jokes. When he saw my red, chipped nail polish, Yosep teased me by saying that I had "witch fingers". I punched his arm for that.
Apropos of nothing, here's a picture of the open area in front of the train station. This is where I saw Seongwonnie last weekend.
Taken Inside the Green Brownie Coffeeshop.
This morning, I looked out the window and saw one of my afterschool first-graders, Chaeho, and I remarked that he was a fun kid. Seongyo said, "Chaeho's nickname is "vegetable"." I cracked up. In Korean, the word for vegetable is chaeso, so the nickname isn't far off base.
We had a good time, I fed them infinite amounts of bread, and we all learned something. While playing UNO, I laid down an especially good hand, Yosep said, "Horangi power!" meaning "Tiger power!" He remembered that I said Tiger was my nickname and that I was born in 호랑이띠(horangi-ddi), the year of the tiger.
The boys had me look up "띠" on my dictionary so they could know what it meant in English--I translated it as "zodiac year". In Asian countries (or at least in China, Korea, and Japan...not sure about everywhere else), each calendar year is assigned an animal on a 12-year cycle. 2014 is the year of the Horse, for example. And while there are supposed to be personality traits that go with each year, you don't have to get really astrological or predict-the-future-y with any of this. It's mostly just another way to classify people and remember their ages.
Daesung was thrilled to tell me that he was a Tiger, too--this year's crop of 3rd-graders are exactly 12 years younger than me, so the 3rd-graders are all Tigers, the 2nd-graders are Rabbits, and the 1st-graders are Dragons. Daesung made me laugh when he told me that B-Teacher, who is very strong and tough, is Year of the Mouse. I also tried to explain that in America, almost no one knows their birth-year animal because we don't keep track of years in the same way.
There was also a big conversation with me and Daesung about when I'm leaving Korea for the States, and what the time difference is, and how long the flight takes, and where my plane will be stopping, and why it's not landing in Chicago. I feel like I have actual, grown-up human being conversations with Daesung, despite the language barrier. He knows how to ask interesting questions in Korean, and I can generally understand them and reply with something halfway coherent.
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7 PM: Got back in from the gimbap restaurant, and from buying train tickets to church on Sunday. I'm set for the weekend! Now to buy a new luggage (my suitcase molded in my closet) and to book a train ticket to the airport on Monday. :-)
