아자아자화이팅!! (a-ja-a-ja-hwa-i-ting)=”work hard and push thru to victory, stay positive!” Roughly, it’s something to be said to get a team to work hard, or to get an invidual who’s down in the dumps to cheer up and keep pushing forward. The second component of the phrase, hwa-i-ting, is actually a borrowing from English: it comes from the word “fighting” and is used like a cheer at sporting event, meaning “go team!” I think it must have come into Korean via Japanese – English words with an “f” sound that enter Korean directly tend to get transliterated to “p” sound, but Japanese turns f’s into h’s most typically, and so when English words come into Korean with “f” changed to “h” or “hw” I assume it’s through Japanese.
Anyway, my students were complaining about something today, kind of moping and moaning (not unlike myself, outside of the classroom), and I said that phrase (which I learned watching one of those Korean dramas I’ve been neglecting since my return from Australia). They immediately perked up, partly because they’re conditioned to do so, but also because of the novelty of having an English native-speaker say it to them, maybe.