False Shibboleth

When I was in grad school, I was briefly friends with the students in the year above me. For some reason, my year was full of people who didn't want to get together and do things, and I wanted to do things, so I hung out with the "older" group (I say older, but about half of them were younger than me). One of the group was a young woman who, like me, was fond of Kpop, and we occasionally talked about music and various bands. I quickly found out she was a fan of the group Nu'est, a group that debuted in 2012 with a song about bullying, which was cool, because I also liked their music. I tried talking with her about them, but then I ran into an unexpected issue that still taints my ability to listen to their music today. Context 1: I speak Korean. I trained at the Defense Language Institute in California, spending upwards of 7 hours a day in language and culture classes with native speakers, then spending up to 2 hours on homework in between my military duties, for nearly a year and a…