Category: 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

가는   말이  고와야          오는    말이  곱다
going word be-charming-IF coming word be-charming
If outgoing words are charming then incoming words are charming.
Speak well and kindly to others, and they will return the favor. This is the Golden Rule, applied to words, anyway. It’s also the converse of the famous dictum “garbage in, garbage out.”
I certainly think this true. It’s not always easy to keep to it, in practice, but I’m always and forever trying.
 

열   길       물     속은   알아도    
ten gil [of] water inside know-BUT
한       길                         사람          속은          모른다
one gil [of] a person inside don’t-know
One can know ten gil of water,
but one can’t know even one gil of a person.
A “gil” is a traditional measure, maybe 10 or 11 feet, but used as a “fathom” in English.
People are unfathomable. Um. Yeah.

떡         본   김에      제사             지낸다
rice-cake seen while-AT ancestral-rites stay
As long as you've seen the rice-cakes, stay for the ancestral rites.

I found this one in my grammar bible in slightly different form, while researching the paraphrastic "-ㄴ 김에" – which at least I recognized as a paraphrastic. It is glossed as "while one is at something," and I took the liberty of reading it in this case as "as long as one has V." The equivalent proverb in English might be "Strike while the iron is hot." As long as you're doing one simple thing, do the other more complicated thing as well.

어물전       망신은    꼴뚜기가             시킨다
fish-store dishonor small-octopus-SUBJ causes
A small octopus causes a fish-store['s] dishonor.

A single small member of a large organization can ruin it for everybody. That's what this seems to mean. "One bad apple ruins the barrel" might be an English equivalent.

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.

공자       앞에서      문자              쓴다
Confucius front-LOC letter[character] write
[…Like] writing in front of Confucius.

This is a proverb that expresses the ridiculousness of trying to teach a master. "…Trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs" is the equivalent classic English language proverb, but it's one that so far out of date as to be incomprehensible to modern speakers.

개천에서     용     난다
creek-from dragon comes-out
The dragon rises up from the stream.

This is the idea that a great person can emerge from poor circumstances.

걱정도       팔자다
worry-even destiny-is
Even worry is destiny.

Yep.

I worry a lot. Such is my destiny.

남의              떡이            커     보인다
other-person-GEN rice-cake-SUBJ is-big looks
Another person's rice cake looks big[ger].

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. This is true. But I can never figure out if I even want grass or not. So to speak.

하늘에서  별   따기
sky-ABL star pick-GER
[…like] picking stars from the sky

Which is to say, trying to do something impossible. Pretty self-explanatory. I've not been very consistent in how I mark (terminologically speaking) word endings – I use so many different reference sources, and there's certainly no consensus among those sources. I sometimes think of the -에서 ending as an ablative or simply "lative" case for nouns. And there is definitely something gerund-like in the -기 ending for verbs. Hence my choices for today, above.

The sky is overcast. It might rain later.

눈엣     가시
eye-LOC thorn
A thorn in the eye.

This means the same as English's "pain in the ass," roughly. I was very proud to recognize the meaningless epenthetic -ㅅ on the LOCative case ending -에. I wonder whether it's etymological – a typical linguist's type of question...

망건         쓰자                            파장된다
manggeon    sseu-ja                        pajang-doen-da
headband    put-on-AS-SOON-AS   [the exam] ends
“Put on the headband just when the exam is over.”

[broken link! FIXME] There is a Korean tradition of putting on a headband (such as a traditional horsehair headband – 망건) before taking on some difficult challenge or task, such as taking a major exam or protesting against the government or some other huge challenge. This expression means that you don’t get around to putting on the headband until the challenge is basically past. It’s proverbial meaning therefore seems like something like “Frittering away opportunities.” Some dictionaries have, “muddling away one’s opportunity,” which is essentially the same.

Some translations have “Easier said than done,” instead. I don’t think this is the same thing at all. Thus, I would say the first interpretation above – “frittering away opportunities” – describes my life perfectly. The latter is not as close a fit.

Wait – lemme go put on my headband. I’ll get back to you.

독      안에       든        쥐
poison inside-ABL entering rat
[Like] a rat going into the poison

A very bad situation that cannot be escaped from, supposedly. "Between a rock and a hard place," maybe.

백지장도           맞들면               낫다
blank-sheet-EVEN lift-up-together-IF improve
Even a blank sheet [of paper], if lifted together [as a team], [things] improve.
Wow that was difficult! Why do I even try these proverbs. The key to making sense of this was understanding the verb 맞들다, which seems to mean “lift up together, join forces, cooperate as a team.” But even then, the syntax seemed fragmentary, missing too many elements.  The proverb-to-proverb translation would be “Two heads are better than one.”
I had to cheat in order to make sense of this. My first draft, pre-cheat, was “if one hundred hinderances are tasty, things improve.” I thought it might be something weirdly Buddhist. I had carelessly mis-read (and mis-re-typed into the dictionary) the subordinate verb as 맛들다 [to be tasty, to become delicious], which would have the same pronunciation as 맞들다, but a slightly different spelling. And I had mis-parsed the noun phrase at the beginning as 백-지장 instead of 백지-장, hence the “one hundred hinderances” – but I’d made a mistake too, since that’s not really accurate given the need for a COUNTER particle if you’re going to count things.

I’ve been fishing around for some new activity to replace my year-long effort to translate the 108 Buddhist aphorisms. [broken link! FIXME] The 108 were the right level of difficulty – they were quite hard in some ways, but because I was somewhat familiar with the subject matter (i.e. Buddhism) and they were predictable (they followed patterns) I could manage them.
I’ve been looking at various lists of Korean proverbs and aphorisms. Every time I try to understand one (without looking at the translation), I don’t do very well. But I’m still tempted to mess with it, because I like proverbs and aphorisms, and they give a lot of insight into culture.
Here’s a proverb from one of those lists.
맨끝에 정든다
only-end-AT attachment-begins
“Only at the end does one grow attached.”
I take the verb to based on the root 들다 which would mean it’s irregular in a way I didn’t realize (dropping -ㄹ)
I think the [broken link! FIXME] 정 [jeong] here is the same 정 (情) [sentiment, attachment, love] I’ve discussed previously.
I didn’t select this proverb because it seemed particularly relevant to any of my current life events – I only selected it because it popped out of the list as something I might be able to figure out in a reasonable amount of time.
Maybe I’ll try to do a more-or-less randomly selected proverb a couple times a week. We’ll see how that develops.