Yesterday, I played a game with a few of my middle school classes. It was a basic Taboo or Hot Seat style game, where one person comes up to the front and doesn’t look at the TV. A word and picture come on the screen and the others on their team have to describe it without saying the word or using any Korean.
It was amazing some of the ways they came up with to describe things using their limited vocabulary. Some were fairly obvious, like “Justin ____” for the word “beaver”, since Koreans pronounce “Bieber” and “beaver” the same. For others, they used Korean as a base, like “rock whale” for dolphin, since the Korean word for dolphin literally means “rock whale” (although I’m pretty sure the rock part of that is just a homophone for something else). Also, for the word “pear”, they pointed to their stomachs, since the word for stomach and pear are the same in Korean (not that anyone guessed correctly using that clue. They usually just passed on that one.)
And then there were some others. Take the quiz and see if you can guess the answers based on the clues that they gave (and which their friends used to guess the word correctly.) The answers are at the end.
Quiz
1. “firefighter’s friend”
2. “chicken changed”
3. “Edison” (plus pointing up)
4. “Pizza’s friend”
5. “white water”
6. “small round cake”
7. “bird king”
8. “lion’s friend”
9. “Korean number 1 food”
10. “Made in _______”
How many could you guess? Scroll down to see how you did.
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Answers:
1. “police officer” (They tend to link these two jobs.)
2. “kitchen” (Korean students always mix these two words up, so they see them as related.)
3. “light”
4. “chicken” or “pickles” (This had two, since they closely relate pizza and chicken, but also when you order pizza here, pickles always come with them as a side dish, even with delivery.)
5. “milk”
6 “muffin”
7. “eagle”
8. “tiger”
9. “kimchi”
10. “China” (even in Korea, a lot of things are manufactured in China, so they are used to seeing Made in China.)
The Green-Walled Tower 