Here goes one more category to our already-full list of interesting categories in our KoreanClass101 Blog. But I believe this will be a very good opportunity for everyone to enjoy (and understand) pictures of some ‘written Korean’ found in Korea.

As a lot of you might already know, I’ve been posting these pictures in the KClass forum under the name of “translation practice” – in the hope of giving everybody a chance to take a guess at what they think certain signboards or written announcements mean and check their knowledge of the Korean language, and I’m so thankful to everyone who’s been participating. 🙂 But then I don’t really have a proper chance to provide ‘answers’ or at least … the way I would express it into English to the best of my ability, so from now, I’ll be taking one picture from the forum and post it here, and tell you what the words mean 🙂 Who knows? If we have a *favored* photo by everybody, we might even do a lesson with that photo.

The photo that I want to talk about today is this one:

This is quite easy, actually. 🙂

꿀 is honey and 포도 is grapes. So 꿀 포도 means “grapes that are as sweet as honey.”

I’m not sure if the word “honey” is used as often in English as it is in Korean to symbolize “sweetness” but this word can work with a lot of fruit names.

꿀 사과 = very sweet apples

꿀 복숭아 = very sweet peaches

꿀 배 = very sweet pears

It doesn’t work with every fruit name, but you can always describe something with this word “꿀” to mean it tastes very sweet.

But 꿀밤 (밤=chestnut) doesn’t mean “sweet chestnut” – it means a punch on the head with a fist as a gesture of scolding. That’s why as I kid I would always play practical jokes with my friends, saying things like “밤 줄까?” – “응.” – (punch!) – “여기 꿀밤이다!”

I know it’s not funny at all. Haha. 😀 But it WAS. For some reason, it was ALWAYS a lot of fun, until I was over 10 years old, that is.

Thanks for reading!