Of course, it is well known that Korean speakers struggle with the phonemic character of the "L-R distinction" in English. In fact, Korean possesses both sounds (at least, approximately, and with some caveats vis-a-vis the retroflex character of the English R), but in Korean the distinction is not phonemic but instead allophonically complementary.
If the above paragraph is gobbledygook, that's OK. I'm just being a linguist.
My point for this blog post is that sometimes my students make humorous mistakes. My student Cody was trying to give a debate speech about why zoos are not good for animals, and he was trying to say that life in a zoo is boring for animals, but his pronunciation consistently and clearly rendered "boring" as "boiling" – this is not just an L-R mistake but I think he was genuinely confusing the two words. Added to this is the typical "agent/patient" confusion typical with Korean learners of English (i.e. "The sea lion is bored" being rendered as "The sea lion is boring.").
I was struggling to explain to him the difference. Finally, on a piece of scrap paper, I sketched a zoo with bored animals, and then added a boiling sea lion. This seemed to get the message across – even though I received a lot of criticism for the quality of my sea lion. I agree it's a pretty implausible sea lion, but he is clearly boiling.
[daily log: walking, 6km]