Went to the Jew, er, I mean, zoo.

Yes, I did go to a real zoo, and it reminded me of an anecdote I heard from someone else.

This someone else is from the U.S.A. and speaks English as his native language, but is also interested in Korean and knows about the sounds, letters, and even a few words in Korean. He was friends with a Korean couple and, one day, he let them babysit his daughter. At the end of the day, when the Korean couple brought his daughter back, he asked them what they did. They replied, "We went to the Jew."

My friend was startled, wondering whether there was a famous Jewish person visiting town or something, and asked, "What Jew?"
The Koreans started explaining, "You know, the place with the animals.." and then my friend remembered that in Korean, the sound that English-speakers associate with the letter "z" does not exist. He knew that before, but at the time, because the pronunciation they gave was so close to an already existing word in English, his mind automatically linked what he heard with what meaning it is normally associated with.

It's like, when you're spell-checking something you write, some of the typos don't get caught because they do spell existing words, just not what you intended. I mix up "their" and "there" or "your" and "you're" a lot, for example.

If it had been a different word that does not make a word in English when the z is replaced by a j, say, a "jebra" instead of a "zebra," my friend would have immediately understood that the Koreans meant to say "zebra." However, when the mispronounced word sounds like another word that is in one's mental word collection, that word is gonna jump up and down and scream, "That's me!!" even if the rest of the context doesn't make much sense.

There are a few minimal pairs where such confusions could lead to embarrassment. Many Koreans and Japanese do not distinguish the sounds "r" and "l." Say then mean to say "election" and they pronounce it with an "r." Or, I had a classmate in high school who couldn't produce the long "ee" sound in "sheet" and the vowel always came out too short.


In such cases, paying attention to the context would be the key for resolving the confusion. Although ignoring the voice of the misidentified word in your mind is not that easy...