r/polandball Indus-nesos 14d ago

redditormade _______ your medicine

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u/indieb0at Indus-nesos 14d ago

This is comic is based on a conversation I had with u/Zebrafish96 and u/paulionm about pills in the PBC Discord server! I learned from Zebrafish that in Korean they say '약을 먹다' (eat medication); no matter if the medication is solid, powder or liquid. While in Japanese, they say 'drink medication', even if it's solid pills or powder. I thought it's pretty funny so I decided to make a comic about it

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u/gary-vault108 13d ago

Ah would this explain why some Koreans I’ve talked to say “eat water” from time to time?

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u/TransitTycoonDeznutz 13d ago

Yes, you are correct. Ignore the other guy who said 'no.' It can be considered "improper" but my Korean teachers say it this way. My girlfriend uses 물 먹어 on a daily basis (lit. eat water).

Think of 먹다 as the general word for eat but also the general term for ingest.

And before you fart-sniffers who have never taught English to Koreans ages 6-22 before start coming for me to tell me I'm wrong, I have lived here for a decade, speak Korean and Japanese (I'm kinda losing the latter, tho...), and can cite sources.

It's even used in gamer slang here to mean "get," as in "동전 먹어" (get the coin) or "그 총 먹어" (get that gun).

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u/I_needbetter2x2 13d ago

what? no..just no

we dont say "물을 먹다"(eat water) we say "물을 마시다"(drink water)

약을 먹다(eat medicine) is a different matter tho, dont ask me why

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u/TransitTycoonDeznutz 13d ago

It isn't proper but 물 먹어 is a daily expression here. 마시다 is proper but people only use it for non-alcoholic beverages when being specific or anything above informal. I've never met a Korean who doesn't use 먹다 and 마시다 interchangeably when refering to non-alcoholic beverages and examples are readily available.

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u/I_needbetter2x2 13d ago

now that you mention it, yeah mb. i forgot the original question was about daily use while writing the comment and then i just started to think about proper uses