Tag Archives: humility

Korean saying: Monkeys Falling from Trees

Nationality: Korean
Primary Language: Korean
Age: 50
Occupation: Country Branch Manager
Residence: Seoul, South Korea
Performance Date: 16 February 2024

Tags: monkeys, trees, falling, humility, Korean, proverb, saying

Text:

“원숭이도 나무에서 떨어진다.”

Literal: ‘A monkey can fall from a tree.’

Meaning: ‘Everyone, even experts, can make mistakes, so you have to be humble and careful in whatever you are doing.’

Context:

R is a born and raised South Korean. This is one of the sayings R taught me when growing up in Korea, along with a plethora of other proverbs and lessons. Apparently he had heard it from his father before him and so on, and it’s a pretty common Korean saying. The first time R said this to me was when I had a clarinet concert coming up and was feeling a bit overconfident due to the apparent ease of the music, in which R said this to make me feel calm and make sure I still practiced caution.

Analysis:

Korean culture puts humility and the importance of being modest in very high regard, to the point where boasting about one’s abilities and accepting compliments is seen as rude in most social settings. I find it interesting how monkeys are the first animals to be brought to mind within the context of this saying, as monkeys aren’t often synonymous to Korean culture. Obviously we have monkeys in Korea, but they aren’t brought up as much compared to other Asian countries and such.

Greek Compliments

In Greece it is customary that if you give someone a compliment you must immediately spit on them, making a sound like “p-th p-th”

My roommate is half Greek and she learned this tradition from her mother.  She explained that the spitting is to prevent the compliment from going to their head and inflating their ego.

This is interesting because it promotes a humitity above all else.  This custom illuminates a light on a culture which retains a mentality that people are ordinary and must always remember that.  This seems to be particularly strong in Greek culture where they had a theological system where gods were very similar to humans, they experiences human desires and intereacted with humans on a regular basis.  As a result people were very aware that they were less than gods, who weren’t that special to begin with, leading to a humility and a custom that exists to prevent egos from being inflated.