Another Khmer slip-up

My language skills have improved enough that I can make a bit of chit-chat in Khmer - nothing deep, just general conversation about activities with a few places where I get stuck because I don't know a word.

So, I was having a bit of chit-chat with my language teacher. We were working on using "better than" or "more than" in a sentence. That's when the trouble happened. I thought he said something was better than children. Better than children? That doesn't make any sense.

When this happens in my day-to-day life it is usually with someone who can't speak English any better than I speak Khmer. Communication errors abound in these instances. With my teacher I can stop him and say, "wait. did you just say...?"

S: Did you just say better than children?

T: No. I said movie.

In the sentence the word movie makes a lot more sense, but the khmer words sound so similar. children is "cone." Movie is "cun" (long u sound). When spoken it is hard to make a distinction between the two.

My neighbor Jenni is learning Khmer too. She does language study full-time so she is much farther along than I. I told her about my misunderstanding and she laughed. She confused the same words I had when she was early in her learning. Someone had told her they watched a movie, but she thought they said they had watched children. Her follow-up response was, "oh, what ages?" They just looked at her like she was crazy because the question didn't make any sense to them. Ha!

Thanks Jenni for sharing the story. It makes me feel better that it is a common mistake.