I was presenting a listening passage to my TEPS반 and I was trying to explain the meaning of the word “predecessor,” and I got a bit lazy and just wrote down the Korean (not that I knew – I was looking at the bottom of the page of my script of the question, where unfamiliar vocabulary is glossed into Korean). I wrote the meaning of the word in Korean on the board: 전임자 [jeon-im-ja].
I assumed, then, that that solved the issue. But later a student asked me, “who is Jeon-Imja?” He’d thought it was a person’s name (it has that familiar three-syllable format typical of Korean names). He didn’t know the Korean word. The other students found that entertaining, but it’s important to be reminded that in fact, these kids often are pushing the boundaries of English vocabulary such that its level of complexity exceeds that of their native vocabulary.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]