I go to lunch with two other foreign professors, A and B. A is only new to Korea, and has been learning Korean. As one does, he talks of some of the difficulties.

"Yeah," I sympathize with one of his frustrations, "There seem to be hundreds of ways to say anything in Korean."

"Yeah." he agrees, "And usually the one way I chose isn't one of those ways."

We laugh at the common frustration.

"Like with 'this' and 'that'," he continues. "There's '여기' and '거기' and '저기', and I don't know when to use '거기' and when to use '저기', and then there are '이것' and '그것' and '저것', but sometimes they just say '이' and '그' , and there seems to be no rhyme nor reason.

"I guess I think of '여기' and '저기' more as 'here' and 'there'." I say. He speaks some Japanese, so I am thinking to suggest that the difference between '거기' and '저기' is exactly the difference between 'そこ' and ' あそこ' but I get confused when more than two languages are involved. I get confused when mixing Korean and Japanese.

He goes on, "I was talking to some students the other day at a restaurant, and was trying to say 'that fish looks clean' and everyone laughed."

A bit of an odd thing to say maybe. But there was probably some context. We we never got back to it, but I am curious about it now. "How did you say it?" I asked.

I was expecting the '생선' / '선생' confusion that everyone learning Korean has, mixing up 'fish' and 'teacher'.

Or the '생선' / '물고기' confusion. There are two words for fish– one for the food 'fish', and one for the animal 'fish'. I think this is not so bad, we do this all the time in English, the confusing part is that the word that refers to fish as an animal literally translates as 'water meat'. It seems a deliberate trick to trip up people learning the language.

A's mistake was neither of these.

"... I said '생선 저기 가 깨끗해'."

I blurt laugh.

As English does, Korean has oblique references to the nether regions. I might refer to someone's 'down there', a Korean will refer to the 'below' or their 'that place'– their 'there'.

"So it's funny?" he asks. "Why is it funny? The student's couldn't explain it."

I think perhaps they would just have found the explanation a bit embarrassing. I try, but I am a bit too literal in my translation "You said, 'That fish is clean down there.' "

"Ah," says B, not quite seeing what is funny about it, "As opposed to being clean if it were anywhere else?"

"Not exactly." I say, struggling with explicit mention of the fish's 'bits and pieces' in polite company– I don't know if it was a boy fish or a girl fish, after all. "I guess I mean, 'The fish's ...down there... is clean.' " I add a gesture in the pause.

"Well, that explains the laughing," says A. He then adds, "It was pretty clean down there, though. The whole fish was clean."