A word of advice for anyone learning (but haven’t yet mastered) a foreign language. Think twice before you try to say something clever in that language.

Not long after I arrived in Korea, I had a class that will always hold special memories for me. It was one of my favorite classes of all time. Everyday was a new adventure. There was fantastic chemistry among the students. So well did they get along, in fact, that they didn’t need me to create any sort of a mood. More often than not the class was already in full gear by the time I walked through the door.

One evening the class was more offbeat than usual. It was a Friday and the students were looking forward to having a drink together after class, and it showed. One girl in her mid-20s was acting particularly silly, making jokes every other minute that were mostly funny but sometimes not. Because I had a good rapport with this class, I decided after one of her goofier cracks to tease her. However, being the clever fella that I am (or so I think), I decided to speak to her in Korean. I looked at her and said,

“Wow! (You’re a) crazy girl!”

or, as I understood it in Korean,

“와! 미친 녀.”

Those of you who understand Korean are already either laughing or cringing, but for those of you that don’t, let me explain. The nuance of “crazy girl” as it is expressed in English is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from its meaning in Korean. I did not know this at the moment I uttered those fateful words, but you can be sure that within five seconds after the last syllable left my mouth I was fully aware that I’d said something wrong.

The girl’s smile dropped into a frown and her face at first whitened and then turned a deep red. She started shaking and looked as if she wanted to say something, but she didn’t have the chance because the other students’ pre-”crazy girl” laughter was met by an immediate hush and then unanimously replaced by an astonished, “Oh no! You shouldn’t say that. That’s bad.”

Now, I may not be too smart, but I’m not a complete idiot. I knew I had some ’splainin’ to do. Watching tears well up in the girl’s eyes, I told her that I meant the phrase from the English perspective and not the Korean perspective - which I now plainly understood was bad. Of course she was not a psycho nut bitch from hell. She was just being silly. That’s what I meant.

One by one the other students came around and the mood slowly picked back up. The girl who was the victim of my verbal clumsiness took a little longer to forgive me, but eventually she too let it go and by the end of the class things were back to normal. We even went out for beers afterward.

But I refrained from speaking Korean the rest of the night.