Rock and lock

In the Japanese language, there is an expression "暗礁に乗り上げる," which literally means "be stranded on a reef," and is used to signify a situation of being deadlocked. Some Japanese people mistake "deadlock" for "reef" because both "lock" and "rock" are written in the same way, "ロック," and use a wrong expression 「デッドロックに乗り上げる」, which literally means "run on a deadlock ."　If you are talking with a Japanese person and hear him use this wrong expression, you can rightly imagine that he is confusing lock with rock; the difference of the two words in pronunciation is hard to be noticed among many Japanese people, including me.