Almost English

For those of you who don't already know, my daughter attends a kindergarten in Seoul, South Korea. While her first two classes each day are English speaking classes (which she naturally excels at given her rather large advantage over the Korean children), for the rest of the day everything is conducted in Korean.

They have many songs that they sing and she has learned most of these songs quite well. A few days ago, Emma was singing one of these songs. It is a Korean version of the song, "I'm a Christian". As she was singing it, she suddenly stopped in the middle of a verse and commented to my wife, "Hey Mommy, that almost sounds like English." The fact of the matter is that it actually is English. At least, it's supposed to be. The verse "I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian" is sung in English. There are at least two things we can learn from this:

First, when living in a different culture you grow so accustomed to expecting the foreign and strange that you somehow lose your ability to identify even the familiar when you are confronted with it.

Secondly, the "familiar" as it is replicated by a different culture is sometimes such an imperfect representation of the original that we can't even identify what it is trying to copy.