#icb i'm procrastinating my actual uni work to do nerd shit like this but i had to clarify 😭😭😭

[heesulovebot]

there was a post in the tags saying that jaewon meant guy friend rather than boyfriend at the store and i just wanted to clarify:

i went back and re-listened and jaewon did in fact say 남자친구 (namja chingu; boyfriend). the thing is, korean does have a word for someone who is just a friend. 남자친구 (namja chingu) exclusively means romantic boyfriend because no one would ever call their friend "my boy friend" (also this is a gender thing!! like in english we would call our female friends our girl friend but guys typically would not call their guy friends their boy friends). you would just call them a friend as gender doesn't matter when speaking; korean is contextual. and like in english, if you would need to give more context, you would explain yourself like "yeah my friend's a guy" "친구는 남자예요” etc. i understand this can be confusing since 남자 namja literally means man and 친구 chingu means friend, but when you put namja and chingu together, it becomes boyfriend (romantic)

this nuance is built into the standard language, but if he were to have said a word for "my friend that is a guy" there is a well-known slang term in korean: 남사친 (namsachin). 남사친 is short for "남자 사람 친구” (namja saram chingu). 사람 or saram means person so the translation becomes my friend that is a boy. it's the same for girlfriend/friend that is a girl you would just put 여 at the beginning (여자, yeoja = girl/woman; 여사친 etc.)

however, namsachin is informal so like explained above, jaewon meant boyfriend (as in romantic) because that's the nuance of the word in korean (unlike english where you could say "guy friend"). he wouldn't have used slang with an elder

i get that translations don't often catch the nuance, but in this case, i would say that the translation was 100% correct :')