Korean Expressions in Translation?
Earlier in the week I was teaching an intermediate class of two fifth grade girls and covering the grammatical structure "know how to + [verb]". We went over the examples in the book, I asked them questions, and encouraged them to ask me questions as well. One of my questions was, "Do you know how to swim?". The first girl responded with "Yes, I know how to swim." while the second answered, "No, I'm a beer bottle." From an outside perspective this might come across as an unusual reply, but it's actually a fitting response based on a related Korean expression.
This is covered in the 가나다 Korean for Foreigners Intermediate 1 Workbook (Lesson 16, part 3; page 61), which uses a collection of expressions to help students (of the Korean language) gain practice at using the structure ~(이)라고 / 다고 하다 for quotes and narratives. From the workbook:
3. 수영을 못하는 사람을 맥주병이라고 합니다. Or, in translation: 3. A person who can't swim is called a beer bottle.
(The underlined part is where students supply their answer from a list provided at the top of the exercise.)
Of course, that's using pretty formal speech. A much more informal first person equivalent would be 나 맥주병이야, which is probably what my student had been trying to convey through her response.
While helping my coworkers check student diaries this afternoon I came across an entry from a girl who was writing about spending time at home with her twin brother while her parents were out shopping. She mentioned how she hoped that her mother came back soon and followed that up with the line, "If my house is a watermelon, watermelon in the only in the seedy."
Perhaps not the greatest English, but it kind of gets the point across. This student also translated each of her sentences into Korean, with the quote above written as:
"만약 우리집이 수박이라면 수박 안에는 씨 밖에 없다 ㅠㅠ"
My own translation of that would be, "Supposing our house is a watermelon, there is nothing inside but the seeds."
Perhaps a little formal (academic?), but I wanted to make sure the "만약~ 라면~" and "밖에 없다" structures were both represented. As you've probably gathered, her expression refers to how empty a watermelon is without its inner flesh and alludes to how lonely the seeds would be as the only things inside. It struck me as rather poetic, a sentiment shared by two of my co-teachers. The girl's brother wrote on a similar theme but used a different expression to convey his feelings. His was, "home is red bean that is not in Boonga-bbang".
For those who don't recognize the final word in his sentence, it's a reference to a Korean snack food called Bungeoppang (붕어빵). There are a few different fillings that are used within these fish-shaped pastries, but probably the most common is red bean paste (azuki bean paste), with the beans themselves known as pat (팥) in Korean. Just as a watermelon would be empty without its flesh, a bungeoppang pastry would be empty without its red bean paste inside -- indicating the extant to which the siblings were thinking about and affected by the absence of their mother. One of my co-teachers recognized the second expression as something she had heard before while the other said that she was unfamiliar with it. The two women are about the same age but the teacher who didn't recognize the expression is originally from Gyeongsangnam-do (a province in southeastern Korea), which makes me wonder if it's a local colloquialism or just something that she hadn't encountered before. Not that it's all that important -- it doesn't change the fact that I'm impressed by the creativity shown by these students.