백문이 불여일견
百聞이 不如一見
hundred-hear-SUBJ not-same-one-see
Hearing it a hundred times is not the same as seeing it.
“Seeing is believing” or “A picture is worth a thousand words” or “The proof is in the pudding.”
I chose this proverb because I thought it would be easy, not realizing it was another one of those Chinese-masquerading-as-Korean linguistic fossils. Still, I’ve gotten a little bit competent using the online dictionary, flashing back and forth between the 영어 / 국어 / 한자 [English / Korean / Chinese] tabs, so I figured it out in record time. It was trivial to find the proverbial meaning, since that meaning is the only one conveyed in the Korean-English dictionary. What takes time is sorting out the individual syllables – and you don’t get to lean on Korean syntax in sorting it out, because it’s not really Korean, it’s Chinese, with its rather gnomic and aggressively un-analytical rules.
I wonder sometimes if the South Koreans’ current obsession with English (both as a language of “globalization” to be learned wholesale in schools and academies, as well as a never-ending source for neologisms for their own language) isn’t just a continuation of their two-millenia-long, one-sided love affair with Chinese. They just changed the object of their attention. Regardless, the language seems remarkably open to a certain style of lexical borrowing.
In this light, note, especially, that little Korean particle (이 =- subject marker) inserted into the above proverb. If Chinese is good, then Chinese with some handy disambiguating particles must be better.