A Case Of Mistaken Identity

"Nat saw that the sky was growing dark," Ceyda reads out loud, stumbling over every word and managing to butcher both pronunciation and intonation. I smile encouragingly, but wince internally. I hate having students read out loud; I don't see the point to it. But we are doing an adapted version of Daphne duMaurier's The Birds, and having the students read it out loud is the only way I can be sure that any reading goes on at all.

"The day was cold and bright," Ceyda reads, only bright comes out breet. The other students all smirk and titter. They're no better or worse than Ceyda, but for some reason, they enjoy mocking her. I grit my teeth, thank Ceyda for reading, and pick one of the mockers to read next. He goes great guns until he gets to the word windows, which he reads as wine-does. The others titter.

It's Kemal's turn to read next and he's actually better than the rest, using rising intonation for yes-no questions and sailing through a lot of hard-to-pronounce words. Everyone looks suitably impressed until Kemal gets to a part about the birds flying inland. Three girls smirk and nudge each other and one of them bursts into giggles.

"Just what is so funny?" I demand.

"Hojam," one of the girls laughs, "he say inland!" She rolls her eyes and glances at Kemal. "Pronounce aye-land," she advises him smugly.

I shake my head. "No it isn't. See? It's spelled I-N-L-A-N-D -- there's no S there."

The girls frown at their books. "Hojam, mistake!" one of them tells me. "Island spell S not N."

I go to the board and write ISLAND and INLAND. I draw an island, then next to it a long line depicting a shoreline. I put in waves and the odd fish. "This one is an island," I explain, "and this one--" I quickly draw in arrows to show wind blowing away from the sea "--is inland. In towards the land, you see?"

They frown at the board so I hand them a dictionary and they pore over it until they find inland. Only then are they prepared to believe me.

Things like this happen all the time in my classes. I've had students make wonderfully funny mistakes, insisting that curious meant very angry, that my treasious was what Golum said in Lord of the Rings, and that impotent meant vital. Inland and island are pretty tame stuff in comparison.

I can't help but be amused and sometimes irritated by some of my students' false language hypotheses, but this is a perfectly natural phenomenon. When the brain sees something it hasn't encountered before, it automatically identifies it with the closest thing it remembers.

And if I ever find myself too irritated, I just take a trip down memory lane to the time I first confused the characters 日本 'Nihon' (Japan) and　本日 'honjitsu' (today's).

It was my first week in Japan and I was in a Tokyo restaurant with two fellow fresh-off-the-boat Americans, Mark and Carol. Every beginning Japanese student learns the kanji 日本 for Japan, but 本日 is slightly more advanced and we'd never seen it before.

Mark noticed it first, on a sign on the wall. "Can that be a mistake?" he wondered, pointing. "Isn't the 日 in 日本 supposed to come first?"

I blinked. "You're right! That doesn't make sense, does it?" I said. "I'll bet that's supposed to be 日本, but someone accidentally got it down wrong."

The waiter brought our food just then. He set down plates of steamed white rice, bowls of soup, and plates of broiled mackerel. We started to eat, but 日本 and 本日 stayed in our minds.

After we'd finished, Mark and I stared at the sign, then looked at each other. "Should we tell them about the mistake?"

We decided not to tell him for some reason. Thank God. The term we were so sure was wrong was actually 'Today's Menu' and it had nothing whatsoever to do with Japan.

I still know Mark and Carol and we've never forgotten that awful encounter with 日本 and 本日. To this day, we can't get over how close we came.