It's 21 C (that's 70 F, approximately). First time even close to that temperature, since last Fall, I think. Well, time goes on. Spring is my least favorite season in Korea – it's often smoggy around Seoul, and that's when the Yellow Dust (from Mongolia, laden with Chinese characteristics) is worst. But it often has beautiful individual days, and seeing the flowers and trees bloom is often beautiful, too.
Day: April 8, 2012
Caveat: 개구리 올챙이 적 생각도 못 한다
개구리 올챙이 적 생각도 못 한다
frog tadpole enemy consider-to-be–too cannot
A frog cannot consider a tadpole to be an enemy.
Don’t make enemies of those coming up the ranks, below you. This is perhaps relevant to the teaching profession (note this is a gross understatement). This sentence is devoid of the typical case-markings of Korean (which are always optional in any event, making it a bit harder to sort out – I also didn’t realize that 생각하다 could be a “ditransitive” verb (as the linguists might call it): I decided it must mean something like “consider X to be Y” in this context, and based on the putative proverbial meaning of the phrase. The word 적 is a problem because it has so many possible meanings, including a number of uses as a particle in derived noun phrases – I only got “enemy” because it was there in the translation.
