Try to understand as John Pak talks with his friends in an Ellicott City pool hall:
"Hey, japangee, where you going next?"
"You don't have a good angle, hajimah man."
"I'm dambaeing."
The speech makes perfect sense to Pak's circle of Korean-American friends, who speak without pause. But Pak's speech often causes other patrons to do a double-take.
And that's pretty much the point. Pak, 20, of Woodstock and his friends are speaking Konglish, a rapid-fire mix of Korean and English that is often heard but rarely understood in restaurants, homes and classrooms across Howard County.
Unlike the faltering, heavily accented Konglish of an earlier generation who speak it to be understood by mainstream America, Pak's speech is a quick, confident rap of Korean and English that he views as a symbol of his dual identity and as a kind of code that only young Korean-Americans can understand.
Konglish is generally spoken in small circles of friends and can bounce wildly from simple substitutions - hajimah means "don't" - to the wacky.
"It's [this generation's] language," said Pak, a second-generation Korean-American. "I can speak Korean with Koreans, English with Americans and Konglish with kids like me."
Nobody knows for sure how many of Howard County's nearly 6,000 Korean-Americans speak Konglish, but experts say it is a growing trend among the younger generation.
As recently as a generation ago, Konglish was viewed as a stigma that stained recent immigrants, but "it's amazing how fast that idea has changed," said Kyeyoung Park, an anthropology and Asian-American professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"The [younger] generations suffer less with identity problems," Park said. "They don't wonder 'Who am I?' as much as others ... so they can insist on their own, third culture that's not American and not Korean."
Like any immigrant group, Korean-Americans often struggled to learn English and sometimes retained a heavy accent that was perpetuated in popular television shows like M*A*S*H and imitated in countless comedy sketches and movies.
But today's Konglish is different, at least in the way it is spoken by second-generation - or 1.5-generation - immigrants who came to the United States at a relatively young age. Many of the younger Korean-Americans in Howard County speak English fluently, understand Korean and can easily switch between the two.
Konglish phrases are generally a fairly logical translation or substitution. Dambae means cigarette in Korean, so "I'm dambaeing" means "I'm smoking."
But when Korean-Americans cannot find an exact translation, they will settle for comic effect.
For example, when one of Pak's friends misses a pool shot, Pak derisively labels him as a "dumb japangee."
What's a japangee? a visitor wonders. A bad shot? A loser maybe?
It actually means "vending machine," said Pak, who acknowledged that that his translation is wrong on a literal level but that "japangee just sounds right," he said.
"Konglish doesn't have to make perfect sense," he said.
Despite its frequently joking connotations, Konglish can serve as common ground for Korean-Americans of different language abilities. Seung-Cheol Kim moved to Ellicott City from Seoul, South Korea, two years ago and speaks English fairly well, but he often reverts to Konglish when he is socializing with Korean-Americans who speak English fluently.
"Oh-teh hyung? I'm going to the norebang," the 16-year-old said to a friend. Translation: "How you doing, buddy? I'm going to the karaoke bar."
"I try to speak in English, but sometimes the words ... ahn-nah-wah [don't come out]," Kim said. "Then I speak Konglish."
As popular as Konglish is, many say the language is largely a self-contained phenomenon that is spoken in places with a large Korean-American population.
For example, when Brian Yoo, 17, of Ellicott City goes to Towson or other areas with fewer Korean-Americans, he does not speak Konglish.
"Around [Ellicott City] speaking Konglish is pretty normal, but it just feels weird to speak it there," he said.
It is unclear how far Konglish will evolve. Its Spanish language counterpart, Spanglish, is regularly heard in mainstream commercials and airwaves, where terms like "Yo quiero Taco Bell" and "Livin' la vida loca" were once catchphrases.
But Konglish has not made similar inroads into mainstream America. Part of it could be attributed to the fact that Koreans have a smaller presence than Spanish speakers. More than 35 million Hispanics live in the United States, compared with about a million Koreans, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
"We're going to hear more and more Spanglish ... but that may never happen with Korean or any other language," said Rebecca Oxford, a professor in the department of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education at the University of Maryland.