One of my kindergarten students, perhaps already famous to you for her other cute expressions, often uses an atrociously adorable (but very incorrect) sentence structure when she speaks to me. She also cannot focus to save her life, so she will constantly interrupt the class to volunteer bizarre but cute little gems like this:
"Teacher, my house is yes baby!"
Translation: Teacher, there is a baby at my house!
Another frequent construction in my kindergarten class, this one applied by nearly all my students, is more often expressed as a complaint to rat their classmates out, rather than a spontaneous expression of joy or pride.
"Teacher, [rattee] is my kicking!"
Translation: Teacher, [rattee] is kicking me!
Or: "Teacher, [rattee] is bathroom play!"
Translation: Teacher, [rattee] is playing in the bathroom!
This brings up another interesting mistake my older students make a lot:
"Yesterday I played my friend at the playground."
When they say this I demonstrate an air violin and ask, "Really? You played your friend at the playground?" It's cute to me the things they always forget to say.
Then there are the long and complicated errors. I had one student write on his test once that he ate "a rope of bread." A rope? In Korean the R and L sounds are made by the same letter, and there is no F sound, so it is often replaced by the P sound when converted. So he knew the word was "loaf," but in his mind he remembered it the way he mispronounces it a lot. And how do you spell rope? R-O-P-E, of course. I found it hilarious, and it's way more palatable, as far as mistakes go, than eating "balls of lice."
