Hear Me: Our Summer (청설): What’s in This Title?

🤟The soon-to-be released Korean rom-com film "Hear Me: Our Summer" depicts love signed by hands and felt by the heart. So what’s in this title? A bit of hearsay.


🎬 Main trailer (English subs):

🎬 About the Film: cultureflipper.com/blog/hear-me-our-summer

The Korean title, "Cheong seol" (청설), is made up of two Sino-Korean characters: cheong (청), meaning to hear and seol (설) meaning words or speech. Put together, the phrase means “hear the spoken words,” or “hear what is being expressed,” and it well reflects the film’s complex themes of language, expression, and communicating love. Regrettably, the spoken word or expression part of the original title is missing in the English main title Hear Me. The word “hearsay” would have been perfect format-wise, but of course, it’s completely off the mark meaning-wise.

Cheong seol is not a commonly used phrase in the Korean language, and viewers might first think of pristine snow (homonymous characters). But in Mandarin it might be used generally to mean “it is heard” or “they say.” The title still works well in Korean because cheong is definitely a Korean character that clearly articulates “innocent and youthful feel-good rom-com,” with ties to powerful alliterative words: cheong-chun (청춘) meaning youth, cheong-sun (청순) meaning pure innocence; and cheong-ryang (청량) meaning cool and refreshing.