So one of the oddest things about living here, where basically everyone speaks English a little but basically no one speaks it well, is learning to ignore the subtleties in people's speech. The problem isn't that people speak without any emotional nuance; there's plenty of nuance but almost all of it is uninetantional--and usually a little rude. For instance, I came back to my desk today to find this in my "CoolMessenger" inbox:

Hello, Janaki?
Did you drink a cup of coffee or tea after lunch?
If you don't mind, plese spare your precious time for just small talks for me. How about seeing at the rest area next to 교무실?

My "precious time"???? I mean, if any American person referred to my "precious time," my first instinct would almost certainly to to figure out the last time I snubbed them, or ducked out on an appointment or something. You can imagine my momentary horror that Mr. Lee would take such a haughty tone with me, or at the realization that I must have really messed up.

Then there's the use of "but." In Korean, there are a number of words, used in a variety of circumstances, that for whatever reason are translated into English as "but." As in:
"I'm going to go to bed." "But, don't you have to get up tomorrow at 8?"
"Thanks for dinner, it was great." "But, I think we'll go to the stationery store now."
The buts are nonsensical in English, totally, and meaningless, until you start to feel like you've heard it 100 million times, and you just can't get over the feeling that people are contradicting every. single. thing. you say. Over time, it'll drive you nuts.

I guess it's just strange to realize that half the meaning we give to what people say has very little to do with the actual grammar or the technical definitions of the vocabulary, and more to do with the context in which those words are used. I mean, there's nothing inherently mean about calling someone's time "precious." But grammar and vocab is all the Korean have got, leaving me feeling completely disoriented, like everyone else has become suddenly become just a little unscrewed.