"別小我的看"

Tonight one of my awesome students in my A-10 class had an interesting sentence for one of the voc. words. The word was "strength" and he wrote "All of them have strength and one asked me 'Don't look at me little.'" I asked him during the break what it meant and he couldn't explain how to say it in English. He asked one of his classmates but they also didn't understand how to explain it. He asked if he could use Chinese and it was during the break so I said ok, yes what are you trying to say? He says, "別小我的看." I then thought about it and asked if he meant don't bother me since I have no strength. He goes no..then he said everyone is strong and I am not like them and they tell me this. I finally understood what he was trying to say and what the phrase meant. It means don't underestimate me. 別 means other, 小 means small, 我 means (I,me, myself),的 means of, and 看 means look. It makes sense that he would write "don't look at me" but of course it's used in a different context. Then he took out his electronic dictionary and showed me the defintion and the phrase was defined as "don't be light me." That didn't make sense at all and it was not a good definition by any means but I then understood it more clearly. I got out of the horrible definition as "don't belittle me." It's really cool how similar the two phrases are to one another because 小 is small and my own interpretation of underestimate means small and belittle has "little" in the word, also meaning small. I'm sure all languages have similarities but it's cool to think about it and how one phrase can mean a whole different thing!

-Chihchat