I was sitting quietly on a couch in the lobby of Zurich Continental Hotel,
waiting for a limousine to the airport,
when a young couple of Japanese honeymooner came out of the elevator
and walked to the counter early in the morning.
Guest : Check out, please.
Clerk : [ summing up whole slips together ] No breakfast?
Guest : YES!
Clerk : Yes? You did have TWO breakfasts?
Guest : NO!
Clerk : You mean only ONE breakfast!
Guest : NO, NO!
The clerk seemed then to be a little puzzled and annoyed, and became a little uneasy.
I was wondering whether the clerk had assumed that a just-married Oriental couple might have already consumed three or four breakfasts
while the restaurant staff happened to fail to keep him informed of.
Clerk : OK, OK. Let me check with the restaurant...
Guest : YES.
The clerk made a lengthy talk over the phone in German,
which I could hardly comprehend, and he talked by himself matter-of-factly.
Clerk : No breakfast!
Guest : YES! [ It means, Yes you are correct, in Japanese sense. ]
The clerk glancing up to the guests, no more question was made.
The Japanese tourist paid the bill quietly.
On my birthday Daddy gave me a wonderful gift; "Japanese SONY transistor radio" and asked me to keep listening to AFKN-Radio Newscast, "every hour, on the hour" (매 시간마다, 24시간 내내) -- You can easily imagine how many vocabularies I could pick up while listening to AFKN-Radio newscast. Only just a few words, such as And, But, Because, etc. I kept listening to radio newscast, for an extended period of time, -- for approx. 3-mos, my ear just started to pick a few more words. After one-full-year, on my next birthday I could apprehend nearly 40-50% of Newscast.
My Daddy was so happy to learn my improvements in listening Newscast. He told me, one early morning, "Dany, you made a "great step, forward" !.!.! Now, you can now start to practice your spoken English". His idea was to teach me -- (i) open your ears first !!, and endeavor to understand the meaning and story of the News; THEN (ii) open your mouth, next. Just in the same principle as a baby keeps listening to parent's talks, stories -- then later on, starting to "immitate" parents' wpoken words. Daddy used to tell me "THERE is NO Royal way in learning spoken "Foreign language" -- without hearing, practicing (mimmicking) and improving skills in spoken expressions. = Daniel_Kim;(06)