"I Am Murdered" aka The Perils of Technology

My Chinese name is Libeisha, which is three words combined: li (丽pretty) bei (蓓 flower bud) sha (莎 no real meaning, just used for the sound). But the word 'sha' with the character 杀  means 'murder.'  I sent an email to a student and was typing too fast and when I hit the keys for 'libeisha' the character string that came up first was the murder-sha 杀, not the sound-name-sha 莎. I chose the murder character, didn't notice, and sent off the email.

Hoo boy, did my student find that amusing! He wrote back immediately, "Are you okay? You have been murdered? Oh no!" And told me he had gathered up his classmates to his dorm room so they could see and laugh at my mistake, too. They love that I study Mandarin, but they got quite a kick out of their teacher calling herself  "murdered." Oops. Sometimes, your language skills are only as good as your typing skills.

I use Google Mandarin for my keyboard conversion program, btw. Google owns so many pieces of my life.

My other favorite Mandarin mistake was my students saying, "I am [name]" when they texted or called me. I told them so many times, "Not 'I am [name].' In English we say 'This is [name].'" But this was hard for them to remember and they made this mistake often. Flash forward to my Mandarin class this past fall, when a student stood up to do a dialogue and said (in Mandarin) "This is [name]." My teacher immediately interrupted: "Not 'This is [name]', in Mandarin we say 'I am [name].'"

It made me smile.