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Korean Proverbs

J.K. YOUNG

인사이트케이주식회사 · 2026-11-13 출간 예정

ISBN 9791123127255 · 사회과학

정가 17,500원 · 전자책

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『Korean Proverbs』는 2026-11-13 출간 예정입니다. 출간되면 서점 판매 링크와 함께 이메일로 한 번 알려드립니다.

책 소개

A frog in a well. A dog under a roof. A hundred ways Koreans say what they mean.

A Korean friend texts you a photo of a small, very confident dog standing in a yard, staring up at a chicken on a roof. The caption is in Korean. You ask what it means. She says: “It means I applied for the job and didn’t get it.”

The proverb is 닭 쫓던 개 지붕 쳐다본다: the dog that chased the chicken stares at the roof. It is centuries old, and it is the exact feeling of refreshing your inbox.

Koreans use proverbs the way other people use memes: as a shared reaction, a shorthand, a way to say the thing without saying the thing. There are thousands. This book has a hundred, the ones you will actually hear, with the lives that made them and the moments that keep them alive.

What a Korean proverb is. The Korean word is sokdam, 속담, “common talk.” A sokdam is a short saying in plain Korean, usually a picture (a frog, a rice cake, a stone bridge, a tiger), used to make a point about people. It is different from the four-character idioms of Chinese origin (sajaseongeo, 사자성어), which are literary and are learned in school, though Koreans use both and the book mentions a few of the second kind where they matter. Most sokdam come from the farming villages of the Joseon dynasty and before, and their pictures are of the things a village had: rice, soup, dogs, oxen, wells, kitchens, mothers-in-law, landlords and tigers. That is why they are funny, and why they explain so much: they are the village’s view of human nature, compressed.

How the book is built. Ten parts of ten. Part 1 is food, because Korean proverbs begin at the table. Part 2 is beginnings and effort, the motivational sayings that every Korean student hears. Part 3 is people and relationships. Part 4 is caution and fate. Part 5 is the animals. Part 6 is money and work. Part 7 is words and silence. Part 8 is the family. Part 9 is the proverbs you will hear in Korean television dramas. Part 10 is the new proverbs of the twenty-first century, the coinages of the internet and the newspapers that Koreans now use exactly as their grandparents used the old ones, and that tell you more about young Korea than any survey.

How to read an entry. Each proverb opens with the Korean, the romanization, a literal translation and the meaning. WHERE IT CAME FROM gives the origin where it is known, and says plainly when the story is only “commonly told.” WHERE YOU’LL HEAR IT TODAY puts it in a 2020s room: a group chat, an office, a drama. WHEN TO SAY IT gives the situations where a learner can use it without sounding strange. BREAK IT DOWN takes three words out of the sentence, for learners. COUSIN IN ENGLISH gives the nearest English saying, or says there is none. A RELATED SAYING adds a second proverb or modern phrase from the same family, so that the book holds two hundred sayings in all. KEEP THIS is one line to take away.

Three rules the book follows. First, a proverb that came from the West, such as “the early bird catches the worm” or “blood is thicker than water,” is marked as borrowed; Korea has adopted many, and the book does not pretend they are native. Second, a proverb that carries a value most Koreans now reject, such as the one about beating a loved child, is given with the rejection beside it. Third, an origin is given as fact only when the record supports it. Many proverbs come with charming stories that cannot be traced, and those are marked as commonly told.

For learners. The romanization follows the national system of 2000, with the usual sound changes written as Koreans pronounce them where that helps. A learner who knows twenty of these proverbs will be understood and enjoyed in any Korean room; a learner who uses one at the right moment will be remembered. The back of the book lists all hundred with their meanings, and the proverbs that Korea borrowed and lent.

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