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.
