Category Archives: From friends

As a non-native English speaker, it is fun to learn new English expressions from friends. I am not afraid of asking questions to my friends. Luckily, my friends are so nice that they always do their bests to explain to me. Thank you, all!

08 Apr

Your eyes are bigger than your stomach

Who taught : Brian, Scott, Carol

In the last post, I talked about a big social issue in Korea. Now, let’s talk about America’s. What do you think is one of the serious issues in America? I would say it is “obesity.” The other day, I was watching a new TV show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. In the show, Jamie Oliver who is from UK visited an elementary school in West Virginia. In the school kitchen, employees were preparing breakfast for students. You know what the menu was? It was instant Pizza. And there was another box full of chicken nuggets. They were for lunch. Unbelievable!! I was not able to believe what I was watching. I have to say this show is one of the best shows in a sense that it could help to change children’s diet and, if it could really make children stay fit and healthy, this would contribute to saving a lot of health care cost nationwide in the future.

Speaking of food, I learned two good expressions regarding eating or biting.

1. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach : When Carol told me this one, my interpretation was, “Well eyes cannot be bigger than stomach at all… So, maybe it means something nonsense??” Well, this time I was kind of close. Don’t you agree? This expression means…. Actually, instead of trying to define, let me give you a context. You and your family went to a seafood buffet and you started to pile up a lot of food in you plate. I mean really really high. Then, your wife would say to you, “Oh honey! Your eyes are bigger than your stomach! Can you finish it? You might throw a lot of them out.” I believe we all have the same experience, right? The thing is I always have really small portion and Jessy complains a lot like, “Your stomach must be smaller than your eyes!” πŸ™‚ My feeling with this expression is that it can only be used in relation with food. Can I also use this expression if someone being too greedier than what he/she can afford?

2. Don’t bite off more than you can chew : I think this expression is more suitable to describe the situation that someone being too aggressive. Is this originated from eating apple or something? That is what I feel when I hear this one. Anyways, you would also hear this one often in business conversations. For example, if someone is trying to agree to do something more than he/she can handle, then you can say, “Let’s not bite off more than we can chew! We gotta be realistic.” Actually, today, Scott used this expression in relation with some sort of our sales. So, if you can use this kind of expression in a proper business context, people might think you are pretty good at English and you are hip.

07 Apr

keep up with the Joneses

Who taught: Jake

One of the big issues in Korea is education. Most parents are having a hard time and work hard to meet the cost that they spend on their children’s education. Even many of new married couples postpone to have a baby mostly because of the huge cost of education which will be incurred by having a child. Based on the CIA world factbook, South Korea ranked in 219th out of 223 countries in children per women rate (1.21). Are you curious about United States’ rank? It is 126th (2.05). Surprise, isn’t it?

Why there is that much cost? It is because of private education system. Almost all of the children go to at least two private institutes after their regular school hours to learn so many stuff, such as music instruments, languages, Taekwondo, etc. This situation is getting worse as they become teenagers. Parents need to hire private tutors for their children, mostly for mathematics, English, science, etc. Well, maybe you could say I would not do the same thing for my children? It is hard because if your children do not do the same thing with what other children do, they cannot make friends. Well, I think there is another reason. Parents do not want to fall behind what others do for their children. They would like to give their children at least the same opportunities that other children get.

There is an expression for this case in English. “Keep up with the Joneses!” Here…. the Joneses is an abstract word for representing the neighbors. For example, if your neighbors or friends bought a new luxurious German sedan like bimmer(BMW), then you feel like you should buy Mercedes. Well, if you actually bought a Mercedes for that reason, you are really keeping up with the Joneses. There is another similar expression that you can use. “Peer pressure!” I guess most parents feel peer pressure and, to keep up with the Joneses, spend a lot of money for their children’s education. Speaking of comparison of you and your neighbors, there is also very good one you can use. This expression is really common and you would hear this many times in America. I actually heard this expression today over lunch from my friends. “Grass is greener!” The full one is “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence!” I guess you can get what it means by reading it. Yup, it means “for some reason, everything your neighbor has looks a lot better than what you have.” I know! We all do not want to admit it but it always sounds true. Even you have the same thing your friends have, you always feel like the ones your friends have better than yours. What a life! But, if we can learn how to be satisfied with what we have, we will be a lot more happier than now. Let’s pray, shall we? What? You do not want to pray. Hmm.. I really suggest you to go to church this Sunday.

05 Apr

You can say that but not quite right!

“Double Zero Seven”

If I say it to you, would you be able to understand what I am saying?

The other day, I had a dinner together with Andrew, Beth, Ari, Juan, Mar annnnnd…… Maia. For some reason, we talked about Yuna Kim, the best female figure skater in the world at the moment, who is from South Korea. I talked, “She looks very flirting especially when she uses musics from double zero seven.” Everybody was looking at me puzzled, “What is double zero seven?” “You know the movie with James Bond. Double zero seven. Don’t you know that?” As soon as I said, they were all like, “Oh you mean, double O seven!” My reaction was, “What? It is the same thing, isn’t it?” “Well, it is! But, we do not say ‘double zero seven!’ It should be ‘double O seven!'” I talked about this to Jake and Jean. And Jean told me, “Maybe it is because in the movie they keep saying, ‘double O seven’ and people are so used to saying in that way.” Funny thing is I, as a Korean, learned to use ‘zero’ not to use alphabet ‘O’ to pronounce number 0. So, every time someone ask me my phone number, I always say like, “four zero zero……blah blah zero.” I wonder how many non-native English speakers ever learned to speak number 0 using alphabet O. To be honest, saying ‘ZERO’ is not easy. I think ‘Z’ is one of the hardest English alphabets to pronounce. It is really hard for me to pronounce correctly to distinguish Zac from Jack. (Zac! Have you noticed that I have hard time for this??) Maybe, you should better to practice to use alphabet ‘O’ to speak number 0 instead of using ‘ZERO.’ I mean it is really easy to pronounce and short and, most of all, people do understand what ‘double O seven’ means πŸ™‚

01 Apr

Can you really speak English?

It was really amazing day! Sunny and warm! Besides, I had a real fun time with my friends, playing basketball. After the game, we went to Thai restaurant for dinner. We also had frozen yogurt. It is so great to have a nice fro-yo place near my office. Today, there has been one big question in my mind, “Can you really speak English?” What does it take to be able to SPEAK English? Throughout my life, I think I had gone through a few steps to be able to at least communicate in English.

1. memorizing vocabulary : Initially, I thought I need to know a lot of words to be able to speak English. So, whenever I saw new words from books, I looked them up in my dictionary and memorize the meaning of the words, writing in my exercise books. This definitely helped my reading but not speaking.

2. memorizing sentences or paragraphs : But then there was a big change in my studying pattern after I met the greatest English teacher in my life, Jinyoung Kim. She told me, “You cannot SPEAK English if you do not practice to use words in sentences or phrases. You think you can easily make sentences by organizing some of the words you memorized. That is not going to happen especially when you try to learn English after you are all grown up.” From that time, I basically memorized almost all of the paragraphs of many TOEFL books. The other thing she asked me to practice was INTONATION. Korean is monotonous. That is why it is so hard to speak English with intonation for Koreans. For example, “λ§Œλ‚˜μ„œ λ°˜κ°‘μŠ΅λ‹ˆλ‹€(Man na seo ban gap seup ni da.)” is “nice to meet you!” in Korean. Korean one is so monotonous whereas English one has high pitches and low pitches. I guess if you say “nice to meet you” without intonation, then American people would think, “I do not think you mean it. Maybe you do not want to meet me any more??” Well, to practice these, everyday, standing up in front of a mirror, I talked to myself in English. Even in subway, I just talked to myself, memorizing all of the paragraphs. People looked at me like someone crazy. Even Jessy told me, “You are crazy! Are you married to English?”

3. Learning culture : The longer I live here in America, the more I feel like it is really required to learn and understand the American culture to be able to speak English. That is why, whenever I hear a new expression, I have to ask, “Why do you use it in that case?” or “Why does it have that meaning?” For example, today, Andrew taught me two new expressions. One is “throw down” and the other one is “mano-a-mano.” Then, I asked him like “Why do you use it for that case?” and “So, when you are young, did you use mano-a-mano when you are drunk and having fun with your friends by like pretending fighting?” I mean… Think about it! If you know the origin of the words or expressions, it is really a lot easier to understand, remember and use them in the right context. I know I am still far away from being able to speak English well. But one lesson I would like to share with you is: “Do not afraid of saying, ‘I am sorry! I do not know what it means? Can you explain it to me?'” I mean you have to admit that you cannot be perfect and need to continue to learn as much as you can in your whole years in America, right? No pain, No gain!

I guess this kind of processes would be the same for learning any languages. Do you have any special tricks when you try to learn other languages?

Korean equivalent of “throw down” : ‘ν•œνŒν•˜μž'(han pan ha ja)

Korean equivalent of “mano-a-mano” : ‘μΌλŒ€μΌ λŒ€κ²°’ (il dae il dae gyul)

Don’t use these Koreans to Korean people! They know TaeKwonDo. You would get hurt. Did I tell you that I have a black belt? πŸ™‚

31 Mar

fruits in phrases – Is apple winner?

From Monday till today of this week, my company has provided free lunches. During the lunch time, we also had sort of meetings. In the meetings, Scott made a series of presentations about our new consulting services. I found a very interesting one from the meetings. He used the same expression a few times, “Golden Nugget.” In the context, I believe it was supposed to mean something like “real good core value of a company.” Am I right? I will let our other Professional Services team members add their thoughts on this. Then, my curiosity killed me so that I had to look it up in a dictionary. Then, I found the following from the urban dictionary.

The First piece of excrement that comes of out after a long constipation allowing the persons bowels to empty.

Oh no! so gross! I hope he did not mean this one in the meetings. (Wait! Nobody laughed when he said this.) I was not able to find any other good definitions as I felt from the meeting. Which one is more correct and used by people?

Speaking of the expressions I heard from the company meetings, the other day, I heard this one, “low-hanging fruit.” This means some sort of goal or target you can achieve easily. I can guess the origin of the expression. Thinking of an apple tree, it is a lot easier to pick the low-hanging ones from the tree. Any fruits hung high, it requires a ladder and a lot of efforts.

But, then I had to make sure if this one is really safe for me to use in the future meetings I would participate. So, I looked it up. You know what I found in the urban dictionary. Check this out!

Girls who are somewhat hot – but not too hot, and who often work in posiitons of high public interaction but with low-barriers-to-entry, thus making them open and attractive targets on the one hand, but often self conscious and/or harboring self esteem issues on the other. This, as a whole, makes them susceptible and quite receptive to any overtures from the opposite sex. I.e., They are the easiest of fruit to pick.

What is wrong with the urban dictionary? Is this really something I can rely on? Andrew! I do not think urban dict is my friend any more. –)

Oh, there are other expressions that have fruits in it.

1. big apple : easy one! New York City! I have no idea about the origin of this one. Does anybody know?

2. apple bottom : I learned this one from Jessy. When she was working at a clothing store, there was a jeans brand. It was “apple bottom jeans.” They are for women. Can you guess what this means? Yeah, it describes women’s butt. But, not all of them. It should be looking good from back. I know it is personal. For example, all of the male coworkers of Jessy said, “Jessy, I do not think you have apple bottom.” Well, honey, I do think you have. You got THE apple bottom! πŸ™‚

I guess apple is the Gold medal list when it comes to the expressions with fruits in it???