{"id":17,"date":"2007-10-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-28T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-10-28T23:07:37","modified_gmt":"2007-10-29T03:07:37","slug":"no-soap-please-they-were-honest-mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/aaron-knapp\/2007\/10\/28\/no-soap-please-they-were-honest-mistakes\/","title":{"rendered":"No Soap Please; They Were Honest Mistakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is my language helper, Yoshi.  She and I have become good friends, and I REALLY appreciate her help …and her patience with my mistakes.<\/p>\n

Well, it finally happened.  I have been terrified of the day that I would accidentally say something awful by accident.  I feared that I would accidently say something like, "Your grandmother is a cow." when I meant to say something totally innocent, like, "Your house is lovely."<\/p>\n

I think I topped my own fears on this one.  A couple days ago in my language session, I was trying to figure out what I should do if I accidentally bumped into someone as I was walking down the street.  It was just a tiny piece of culture I wanted to investigate.  My language helper recorded a great story for me about these two guys named Roberto and Pablo (or something like that).  Roberto was walking down the street and he came around a corner and bumped into Pablo.  He excused himself and helped Pablo get up, and they went on their way.  I listened to this story over and over because I wanted to be able to get all the vocabulary down so that I could retell it in my own words at my next session.<\/p>\n

Then came my next session.  Somehow, without realizing it, I told a story about Roberto and Pablo who were touching each other in the street!  My language helper laughed and laughed and I was SOOOOO embarrassed.  The word I should have said:  topa.  The word I said: toca.  On a recording, these two words sound EXTREMELY similar because Spanish has no aspiration (my linguistic-geek friends will know what I mean).  Man, some parts of this language just really leave no room for error!  That was a consonant error.  I did something WAY worse the other day when I messed up a vowel in a Spanish word.  I can’t even tell you about that one.  I would turn every imaginable color of red just typing what I said!  But please don’t wash my mouth out with soap.  I didn’t mean to say such awful things!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Language bloopers that had my language helper blushing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/aaron-knapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/aaron-knapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/aaron-knapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/aaron-knapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/aaron-knapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/aaron-knapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/aaron-knapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/aaron-knapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}