go-ja

This may come as a shock to you, but sometimes there's a communication barrier between my students and me. Sometimes we both handle it in an identical fashion: I say things to them in English that they won't possibly understand, and they say things to me in Korean that I won't possibly understand.

One habit that I've developed is when they say something to me in Korean, I repeat what I hear verbatim back to them. Other times, a student will know how to say part of a sentence in English, then they'll finish the sentence with a Korean word. This happened today, with comical results.

Today, a smart-ass called "Mike" said, "Teacher, you is go-ja?" I thought I'd make the most of this opportunity to not only correct his faulty subject-verb agreement, but to teach him what this word "go-ja" was in English as well. So I said, "Mike- 'You is go-ja?' Bad. You are go-ja." The classroom erupted in laughter. Now I had to know what go-ja meant. Finding no student willing to make an attempt at defining it for me, I typed it into my Korean-to-English dictionary on my cell phone.

Here is my phone's dictionary definition of go-ja: a man with underdeveloped genital organs; an impotent man; a spado.

At least now I have some new ammo to use on any obnoxious Koreans who bother me at a bar.