Every Friday on Arirang Radio, you can listen to Hyunwoo and Adrien talk about Korean expressions that are often not found in dictionaries and difficult to translate literally and also introduce audio clips sent in from listeners around the world. You can listen to the radio show live at 6 PM GMT+9 every Friday at http://arirangradio.com/catchthewave or watch the recorded videos on our TalkToMeInKorean YouTube channel.
Last week, Hyunwoo and Adrien talked about the expressions 반반 and 잘 나가.
Part 1 of last week’s episode is in the video above.
Watch Part 2 here (about 잘 나가)
Watch Part 3 here (audio clips from listeners)
안녕하세요! 비디오 레슨이 재미있었어요!
영어로 반반을 ”fifty-fifty” 있어요. 그리고 사업에 자주 사용해요?
메리 크리스마스!
I always love these Arirang talks.
At a first glance, the expression “잘 나가” seems to have nothing to do with “being good”, but with some further comparison with English and Mandarin, “잘 나가” starts to make sense. In English, I guess “outstanding” can be a good counterpart for “잘 나가”. On the other hand, “突出” (tu:protrude; chu: come out) in Mandarin Chinese also has a similar meaning.
Vietnamese often repeat 2 syllables to make a word, especially when talking about colours, such as “xanh xanh” (that is literally “Blue blue”), “hồng hồng” (“pink pink”), “đen đen” (“black black”) and so on. This is usually used to decrease the intensity of the word. For example: when you say “xanh”, it means that the thing you describe is blue. But when you say “xanh xanh”, it means that the thing you describe is a little bit blue, not as blue as the one before.
I hope that information is interesting (and maybe helpful to you if you are learning Vietnamese). Thanks for reading. And I am a big fan of Korean language as well. 근데 한국어는 재미있지만 너무 어려워요. ㅋㅋㅋ…
That is exactly the same with thai language Phuong Hua. Gosh I didn’t know that Vietnamese language doesn’t only sound like Thai language but the language usage is similar as well. When we say sth is red we say it is “daeng” when we say it’s kind of red we say it’s “daeng daeng”