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What 2-word associates with this rebus? (actually not a rebus) enter image description here

also: What word associates with this rebus?

enter image description here

Hints:

[REBUS 1] Do not look at how its translated.

[REBUS 1] Korean nonsense quiz.

[REBUS 2] The 1st character is 포.

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  • $\begingroup$ Are the words english only 😅 $\endgroup$ Mar 31, 2021 at 9:34

2 Answers 2

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First rebus

I think the characters are as follows 日寿有不多 which roughly represent, respectively, "day", "life", "do not", "have", "many" so possibly roughly translates to "Don't have many days of life".
Two words to represent this could be NEAR DEATH.

Alternatively, as suggested by Jafe in the comments, it could be 時有不多 where 時 translates to "time" and if we consider the rest, the interpretation is something like "Don't have many times".
Google translate gives the translation of the whole string as NOT MUCH which seems to be of a similar intent and could be the answer here.

Second rebus

Thanks to the hints, I now think the characters in the second rebus are 포크 which translates from Korean to "fork" so the answer might be LIGHTNING FORK

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  • $\begingroup$ I think the first character is actually 時 $\endgroup$
    – Jafe
    Apr 9, 2021 at 6:58
  • $\begingroup$ @Jafe Thanks I'll add that in. As I understand it, that character signifies "time", right? $\endgroup$
    – hexomino
    Apr 9, 2021 at 9:09
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The answer to the first one is easily found by googling.

According to this link, it's meant to be WC (i.e. toilet).

Some explanation for people not familiar with the relevant languages:

In the ancient times, Chinese characters were used in the Korean language. But starting from about the year 1443, the Koreans created their own alphabet and Chinese characters became much less used. Consequently, knowing Chinese characters became a symbol of knowledge and well-educated (this is my own understanding from reading online materials, please correct me if I'm wrong).
The story says that an old man went out one day and saw a room with "WC" written on it and didn't know what it meant. A young man told him that it was read as "DaBuLyuSi" and just meant "toilet".
When the old man was back home, he wrote the Chinese characters "多不有時" on his own toilet, because these four characters are pronounced the same way as "DaBuLyuSi". He also wrote them right to left, as it is the traditional way of writing e.g. a horizontal nameplate (something called "현판").
He then told others who didn't understand it that it meant toilet, and said that one should learn hard to understand what toilet is.

No idea for the second, as I actually don't know Korean. Some remarks though:

The first letter, as given in the hint, is 포 which pronounces as "po". The second one looks like a ㅌ (pronounces as "t") but left-right mirrored.
This might indicate that the whole image is left-right mirrored, as 포 is actually symmetric.
Without knowledge in Korean, I'm not able to get anything more. Some googling found the word 포토 which means "photo" but nothing more relevant.

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