I'll admit it, I make mistakes.

We all make mistakes, this is a surprise to no one. We all make language mistakes. Again, this shouldn't be a surprise. One of my tenth graders has created a joke out of my asking Siri. I didn't realize at first just how often I ask Siri to spell a word. Now, anytime I wonder about the spelling of a word one of my students goes, "Hey Siri, how do you spell..."
When I was an exchange student in Germany (and thus learning German) I thought the word for tired (müde) was pronounced just like the word for brother (brüder). As you can probably guess from looking at these words, that simply isn't true. The thing is when you learn a foreign language, especially when you learn it from immersion rather than a classroom setting, you often don't hear the words/sounds quite right.
Other times you fall into the trap of false cognates. In German the word information is Information (although note, it is pronounced a little bit differently). Computer is Computer, and meter is meter (although German nouns do have gender and I realize I'm leaving that part out - on purpose). Additionally, you have words that are very similar like mother in German is Mutter and book is Buch.   But then there are the false cognates - words that look similar or even sound similar, but have rather different meanings. One of my favorite of these is the verb putzen. It sounds a lot like put, but the meaning isn't the least bit similar. One of my fellow exchange students, Laura, told us a story about her misuse of the word putzen. Because she thought it meant put she used it all the time. She would tell her host family she was going to putzen the letter in the mailbox. Now this story gets really funny when I tell you that putzen actually means to clean! After getting over her embarrassment, Laura was able to laugh at this and even shared the story with myself and some of her other foreign exchange student friends (by the way, I don't usually use real names, but I haven't seen Laura in over 20 years and if by some chance you're reading this and your that Laura, please contact me).
Like Laura, I have been forced to accept that fact that no matter how hard I try I will always make mistakes. Sometimes they are grammar mistakes (I make those in English too), sometimes they are mistakes in word choices (now that I think about it, I sometimes make those in English too) and sometimes they're mistakes in writing (I mean spelling, but since I'm about the speak about Chinese which doesn't have an alphabet I chose the word writing).

Here's a screen shot of me typing a Chinese character
here within this blog. If you click on the little drop down
menu on the right, more choices will appear. When you click
anywhere on a new row the numbers will be assigned to
the characters in that row. You select a character by
hitting the number associated with that character.
There are different ways to have the characters sort,
but I usually leave mine sorted by frequency.

As I've mentioned in my last post, I teach a seventh grade science class that didn't go well until I started teaching it bilingually. While this is useful for the students it results in a lot of mistakes because, well let's face it Chinese is a tough language! Today, I gave my students a quiz on organs of the human body. On this quiz, I had typed the Chinese name of the organ and the students had to write the English name. I can type Chinese a lot better than I can write because when I type, I type in pinyin (the romanization of Chinese characters used on the mainland) and pick the character from a list that pops up on my screen. Using this method I only have to be able to recognize the character to type it. One of the words on the quiz was 肾 which means kidneys. Unfortunately, I accidentally chose 神 which means God. Two of the students, knew what I meant (the pronunciation of these characters only varies in the tone) and simply corrected my character. The other students started laughing and putting their hands together and pretending they were praying. The teaching assistant went around the room, correcting their papers and it was all good.
The other day, my mistake was a little funnier. We were reviewing the English names of the organs and I was giving the students the Chinese name and having them
say the English name. Unfortunately instead of saying heart (心xin - first tone), I accidentally said sex ( 性 xing - fourth tone). Now in reality the word for sex, as in how the students took it is 性爱 (xing ai), what I said more like gender, but these are 7th grade boys. They laughed uproariously and that day I didn't have a TA in the room to help me (actually I often don't). Thankfully one of the kids said enough for me to figure out what I might have said. After class, I asked one of my Chinese coworkers some questions in relation to what I might have accidentally said and he turned all red, but didn't answer. Thankfully, my dictionary doesn't get nervous about telling me what words mean.
When I first started teaching this class I felt like it was the bane of my existence. After all, it's not only middle school (not my favorite grade to teach), but it's also life science (my least favorite science) and the kids don't really speak English. Nonetheless, the class has really grown on me. They are still middle schoolers, but they really get into the videos I show them and they bring a unique energy that is actually a lot of fun. Then there are the decidedly middle school actions. For example I introduced the concept of the larynx in class today and wrote the Chinese word on the board. The first character in the Chinese word for larynx ( pronounced yan) sounds the same as to smoke. One of the students got up and jokingly said I had the wrong character and changed it to the character to smoke - I guessed that was the character he wrote because I could recognize the part of the character that means fire (and then the TA confirmed it). A couple of times in class I have introduced the word esophagus (食管 -shi guan) which is pronounced almost the same as the second and third characters in embassy (大使馆 -da shi guan). The shi in esophagus is second tone while in embassy it's third tone (if you don't know anything about Chinese tones second tone is a rising tone and third tone is a falling then rising tone). When that one came up there was no TA in the room, so I was pretty happy that I recognized what the kid was conveying.
While, I do make a lot of mistakes I think it is good. You learn more from your mistakes than you do when you get things wrong. Thus, I'm learning a lot of Chinese (of course not only from my mistakes, but also from preparing for class). I'm also modeling for the students. I need these students to be willing to make mistakes, especially in their language learning. If they aren't willing to try they won't improve. Thus, since I keep making mistakes I keep modeling the fact that its okay to make mistakes and that you need to just keep on trying. And isn't that a lesson that extends well beyond language learning?