One of my neighbors as a teen/early 20's was an older Japanese woman who had married an FBI agent and relocated to the USA. Part of her family were killed when the bombs were dropped. She also knew that my grandfather was a scientist in Los Alamos, NM and helped develop the original atom bomb. Our families were very close and my dad and I would give fish to her that we caught and she would cook them up beautifully. Tragically, when I was home from college one day, I witnessed her husband have a massive heart attack while mowing the lawn. My dad tried to save him with cpr but alas, we were unsuccessful. She harbored my family no ill will for our role in the atomic bombs and we loved her culture and extended family that came into town.
Take the hanja out and do it all in hangul, and maybe he can answer. He's taken on the goal of relearning it now. But He originally learned it back in '62-63 so he's quite rusty. So far it looks like "when did you....?) He also says the tangsin would normally only be used between him and me.
Dongsin is the formal for you. I could have used ㄴㅓ which is informal but not socially acceptable between strangers.
He says he's too rusty now to translate it. He assures me the tangsin is between couples. It is formal, but when speaking with someone with whom you are not familiar, you would use their name, not tangsin. So all he can put together is that it's a question about when, referring to college. He can't place the verb, except that it's past tense. He says, check with him again in about six months. I would have answered sooner, but I was out getting groceries.
you'd be right. I'm only 3rd generation on my mom's side, 2nd/4th from my dad. I'm as white as Uncle Ben's rice (northern Euro mutt.) However, you'd be surprised at how often I get "what are you?" from people around here the Chicago area. People in big immigrant centers just like to know that kind of stuff. Where I grew up in Indiana and Michigan, nobody ever really asked that. Maybe they just assumed everyone was Germanic or Irish unless you had a permanent tan or a funny name. And it's not like white people have a corner on this. My wife is first generation American of Indian decent (Punjabi) and they (Asian Indians from the various ethnic regions in India) are the worst enthnists in the world. You cannot convince me otherwise. Every American of Indian decent I have ever met (both American and foreign born) asks every other Indian "what are you" and then proceeds to gossip about it, both in front of and behind each others' backs. Indian ladies at the supermarket come up to my wife all the time and start talking in random south Indian languages (there's like 10 of them) and she has no idea what they're saying, and then they get all pissy when she says "I only speak Hindi." Of course, Mexican women do the same thing to her with Spanish all the time, but that's a whole other story. She actually speaks Spanish, but will mess with them by acting all huffy and answering in Hindi.
Despite the fact that my mom is korean, hispanics often mistake her as one of their own and start speaking in spanish. I have another friend whos uncle is mexican, but he is often mistaken as a black person and black people come up to him all the time speaking in ebonics. My other friend is puerto rican/black, I just see him as black. Apparently people who aren't puerto rican think he is black while those who are puerto rican can see that he is a mix.
That's what my husband says. It's been a long time for him. The last time he used Korean was in '65. And the ending makes it the subject. It's a question, "when you ... and it looks like college, but Romanization isn't always the best way. And he says the verb is past tense, but it doesn't ring a bell.
