Category: 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

다   된         밥에     재     뿌리기
all make-PPART food-IN ashes spread-GER
[Like…] spreading ashes on prepared food.

“Rain on someone’s parade.” Spoil someone’s happiness.

Sure, I can do that: I’ve been on both ends of it.

In my latest iteration of my efforts to study Korean: I’m doing some tutoring sessions on Saturday, a sort of language exchange.

I learned this proverb / saying:

실패는         성공의        어머니다
failure-TOPIC success-GEN mother-COP
Failure is the mother of success.

I think this makes sense. But failure is also the mother of more failure. And success can be the mother of more success. Not to be too gloomy. Call it the gene-mixing rule as applied to failure and success.

My notes from class (easy to take notes with a camera in your phone, right? – I learned that trick from my students):

What I’m listening to right now.

My Bloody Valentine, “Soon.”

매사는 불여 튼튼
everything-TOPIC blow-[?]-strong[ly]
In everything blow [as on a fire] strongly.

I don’t know what to do with the particle -여 after the 불 (flame? if it’s a noun). Is it a form of the copula? Is it some other thing? So… is it a conjugation of the 불다 (blow) instead? The one place I found this proverb with any kind of translation, it was correlated with a meaning something like “Always double-check.” So I’m going to go with a strange defective conjugation of 불다, maybe a kind of imperative, I guess, but I feel like I’m not really understanding this. The word order is very non-Korean-seeming, too – why is there a sort of adverbialized 튼튼 at the end? That’s not a normal place for it.

꿩 대신 닭
pheasant substitute chicken
Substitute pheasant for chicken.

“Better half-a-loaf than none.” 

This seems reasonable. Am I having a pheasant life?

구슬이 서 말이라도 꿰야 보배라
bead-SUBJ hold[?] word[?]-EVEN-IF string[Verb-meaning]-IN-ORDER-TO treasure-[?]
[Something about beads being held and treasure and stringing them together]

This was impossible for me to translate. Lately, I’ve been finding all these Korean proverbs that I really can’t figure out. I get the meaning of this one but individual vocabulary items, like “서” and “말” are what I think of as overloaded homonyms – there are so many possible meanings that I can’t make a decision that narrows it down, even within context. Each of those morphemes has several dozen dictionary entries. I can only guess how they fit together, even given the context of beads and string. I don’t get 보배라 either. Google translate is useless. 보배 is “treasure” but then what is 라? – that’s a verb ending meaning command, or else it can crop up in the rather irregular conjugation of the copula (BE verb), but in that case it’s preceded by morpheme 이 which is the main copula. I’m stumped.

“Beads cannot make a necklace without string.” This is a slight alteration of a translation found online, which is unenlightening vis-a-vis the nuts-and-bolts grammar of the sentence.

I think the point of the proverb is that you need string to string beads – not just beads. You need a certain minimum to get along to something. Not sure what the English equivalent proverb is.

The pictures below are my prayer beads I strung along with 108 bows (prostrations) while on the temple stay in 2010.

구전지훼
???

I was utterly unable to figure this out. I can’t even find dictionary entries that make sense to me.

I don’t actually think it’s Korean, based on some research. I think it’s Chinese. But like most old Chinese, it has a “Korean pronunciation,” which is what that is above. The hanja (Chinese) is: 求全之毁. It’s by Mencius (孟子=맹자) – the Confucian philosopher from long, long ago.

So I didn’t know what it was, but I found it in the online hanja dictionary, with a definition in Korean: 행동이나 몸가짐을 빈틈없이 온전히 하려다가 오히려 뜻밖에 남에게 욕을 듣게 됨. This was too hard for me to figure out, but I started to get the drift, and did some searching. I found this more concise definition: 온전하기를 구하다가 비난받음.  This could translate as “Condemned to seek perfection.”

That, at least, makes sense. But I also found Mencius’s phrase linked to Moliere’s: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” So maybe that’s a rough equivalent proverb? Hard to say. I’m giong to have to think about it.

걱정도 팔자
worry-TOO sell-PROP
Let’s even sell worries.

“Don’t worry about it” or “You worry too much” or even “None of your business.” It doesn’t feel particularly polite.

I also found a version with the ending -군 (i.e. 걱정도 팔자군) in the daum.net dictionary, but that is much more puzzling to me grammatically, since I had no idea an exclamatory and a propositive could combine that way: a sort of exclamatory proposition?

거름        지고       장에      간다
fertilizer carry-AND field-TO go-PRES
Carry fertilizer and go to the field.

According to one site, this supposedly means “Jump on the bandwagon.” I couldn’t confirm it anywhere else, though, despite some searching and googling. I would need more cultural information to confirm this – as it stands, I honestly don’t feel like I know what this means.

개밥에        도토리
dog-food-IN acorn
[Like] acorns in dogfood.

This means someone or something out of place. "A fish out of water" or "A square peg in a round hole" are perhaps similar English expressions.

Anyway, I like it. I imagine the dog, eyeing his food suspiciously.

강     건너    불   구경이다
river across fire watching-IS
It's […like] watching a fire across the river.

I guess this means "someone else's business," or one site had "sit on one's hands," which I don't see as being the same as "someone else's business" but I can see the relation.

간에      기별도        안간다
liver-IN news-NOTEVEN not-go-PRES
Not even news to the liver.

This isn't that hard to translate, but I had no idea what it meant, nor, once I found what it meant with an online search, why it meant that. Allegedly, it means something like "Not enough to feed a fly." Apparently, the idea is that if you eat too small of an amount, the liver, which participates in digestion according to traditional Eastern medicine, wouldn't get the news. Extended metaphorically, it means just something too small to matter, i.e. "Just ripples in the ocean."

가지    많은                나무  바람  잘           날  없다
branch have-many-PASTPART tree wind calm-FUTPART day doesn’t-exist
A tree with many branches can’t have a calm day [if there is] wind.
“Too many pots on the stove,” maybe. “Too many irons in the fire,” is another possibility. Or there’s some Chinese proverb about mothers with large broods never having a peaceful time.

가시방석
thorn-cushion
Seat of thorns
“The hot seat.” The cushion (방석) is the traditional sitting cushion (see picture). But the metaphorical meaning is a seat of unpleasantness.

가물에      콩    나듯
drought-IN bean sprout-LIKE
Like a bean sprouting in a drought.
A suggested meaning is “Few and far between.” I could buy that, I guess.

꿈이        있다면          절대      포기하지마라
dream-SUBJ have-TRANSF-IF absolute surrender-NEG-COMMAND
If [you] have a dream don’t ever surrender.
“Don’t ever give up your dreams.”

Grammatically, I don’t really get the -다- particle in the first clause’s verb 있다면. My grammar bible insinuates that there’s something called a “transferative” marker, hence my labelling it as TRANSF above, but I don’t see how it contributes any nuance of meaning to the proverb – I think 있으면 would mean exactly the same thing, with the IF (“conditional” marker) attached directly to the verb. Indeed, google translate offers no change of meaning in the two versions – not that that means anything at all.

Yea, well, I mentioned this proverb in my rant-of-despair the other day, so I decided to look at it properly. Context: giving up a dream.

똥   묻은            개가      겨    묻은           개  나무란다
poop bury-PASTPART dog-SUBJ chaff bury-PASTPART dog rebuke-PRES
The dog that buries chaff rebukes the dog that buries poop.
This is one of those “pot calling the kettle black” proverbs. Basically, it means “don’t be a hypocrite.”
It’s notable perhaps because of the appearance of that all-purpose word 똥 [ttong], a favorite of fifth-grade boys, which can translate as everything from manure to poop to shit to dung. It’s not really a bad word in Korean, though obviously it’s not high discourse. But it creates problems when kids look in the dictionaries and find “shit” and use it freely in translation, because that’s not as acceptable as using 똥 in Korean.

눈   감으면   코   베어먹을           세상
eye shut-IF nose chop-eat-FUTPART world
[It’s] a world where if you shut your eyes your nose gets chopped off and eaten.
This is another proverb on the theme of the “Dog-eat-dog world.” Ah well. While I agree with the sentiments in such proverbs at some level, I also suffer from a weird optimism about human nature that means I tend to think other things are more important – such as kindness, “presumption of innocence,” etc.

개미 구멍으로  둑도      무너진다
ant hole-BY dike-TOO collapse-PRES
Even a dike can be brought down by an ant-hole.
This is often what we call the “snowball effect,” I think. Small things have large outcomes. Also, lately, the “butterfly effect” metaphor, although that seems to be on a larger scale than ants and dikes.

먼               친척보다        가까운        이웃이         낫다
is-distant-PART relative-THAN is-near-PART neighbor-SUBJ is-better
A nearby neighbor is better than a faraway relative.
I’m not able to think of an equivalent English proverb off the top of my head, but this one is pretty straightforward. I guess all my relatives are pretty faraway.

말하기는          쉬워도       행동하기는      어렵다
speak-GER-TOPIC is-easy-TOO act-GER-TOPIC is-hard
Speaking is easy but acting is hard.
“Easier said than done.”
I found some translations of this proverb offering something in the vein of “A word is worth a thousand dollars,” and the spreadsheet-o-proverbs that I made and have been working from for all the proverbs, which is cut-n-pasted from various bilingual compilations found online, offers this elaboration: “If you are nice to the person you borrowed money from, maybe they`ll forget about the debt.” Frankly, this doesn’t make any sense at all.
I think the proverb just means actions are harder than words, which is almost what it says literally. I’m not sure where the other comes from – perhaps it’s some cut-n-paste error.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I agree with the proverb. If the words are in Korean, and the person speaking them is me, then I think the words are harder than the action. And if the words are in English, and the person speaking them is one of my students, I think the same. Words are only easy if you know the language. Otherwise, actions are easier. Heh.

 

뚝배기보다      장     맛이        좋다
clay-pot-THAN sauce taste-SUBJ good
The sauce tastes better than the clay pot [that it’s in].
Everywhere I looked, on the internet, the equivalent proverb given for this one is “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” But I’m not sure I see how this works. If I had to guess the meaning, rather than trust the internet, I’d be more inclined to read it as something like, “there are rewards to looking more deeply into something.” That’s obviously related to the “Don’t judge a book by its cover” aphorism, but it’s not exactly the same. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” really seems to be about not jumping to conclusions, while this is more about knowing there is something better inside. Perhaps the distinction I’m trying for is too subtle? Maybe I don’t really understand the English aphorism, either?

두 손뼉이맞아야 소리가 난다
two palm-SUBJ meet-IN-ORDER-THAT sound-SUBJ is-produced-PRES
Two palms must meet in order for sound to be produced.
“It takes two to tango.” This proverb is kind of an inversion of the famous Zen koan about the sound of one hand clapping. It answers, and says: c’mon, get real.