Three things tend to trip up newcomers in their first week in Korea, and none of them is the language itself. Someone asks how old you are within a minute of meeting you. Nobody uses your given name. And the address you carefully wrote down does not seem to help the taxi driver. Each has a straightforward explanation, and each is easier to absorb before you arrive than after.
The Age Question Comes First for a Reason
Being asked your age by someone you have just met is normal here, and it is not idle curiosity. Korean grades politeness through its verb endings, and choosing between those grades depends on the relative ages of the speakers. Until age is settled, a Korean speaker does not know which form of the language to use with you.
The question usually arrives early and directly, often alongside your name. Treat it as a practical matter rather than a personal one. Once the answer is known, the conversation can proceed on stable footing.
Traditional Counting, and Why It Produced Three Ages
Under the traditional system, 세는나이 (se-neun nai), a newborn is one year old on the day of birth, and everyone gains a year together on 1 January rather than on their own birthday. The effect is that a baby born in late December turns two a few days later while still being days old.
A second system ran alongside it. 연 나이 (yeon nai), or "year age," is simply the current calendar year minus your birth year, and it was written into laws where a clean annual cutoff mattered — school entry, conscription, the legal age for alcohol and tobacco. Add the international reckoning used on a passport and a single person could hold three different ages at once, which is precisely the mess the reform was meant to clear up.
What the 2023 Change Actually Did
In June 2023 South Korea amended its civil and administrative law to make 만 나이 (man nai) — international age, counted from birthdays — the default standard. The aim was to remove ambiguity from contracts, medical records, insurance and public documents, where the coexisting systems had produced real disputes.
This is where the usual summary goes slightly wrong. The change was legal and administrative, not social. Official paperwork had largely used 만 나이 already; the reform made it the presumed meaning of an unqualified age rather than inventing it. Year age still governs a handful of statutes, and in conversation plenty of people, particularly older ones, still think in traditional age. If a form asks your age, it means the new standard. If a stranger at a table asks, they may still mean the old number, and there is nothing rude about clarifying which you gave.
Age Decides More Than Grammar
Once relative age is established, it shapes small behaviours for the rest of the evening. The older person is served first, takes the seat furthest from the door, and is poured for rather than pouring. When receiving a drink or handing something over, you use two hands, or support your right forearm with your left.
It also determines what people call each other. A younger man calls an older man 형 (hyeong) and an older woman 누나 (nuna); a younger woman uses 오빠 (oppa) and 언니 (eonni). These are literally sibling words, applied well beyond family, and being placed into one of those relationships signals warmth rather than distance. The same logic runs through the table itself, covered in the guide to Korean dining customs.
The Family Name Comes First, and There Are Very Few
A Korean name is written family name first, given name second. 정인아 is the surname 정 (Jeong) followed by the given name 인아 (Ina). English-language documents sometimes reverse the order to match Western convention, and that inconsistency is the main source of confusion: shown a Korean name in Latin letters, you often cannot tell which part is which without asking.
What surprises most newcomers is how few surnames are in circulation. Five cover a very large share of the population:
- 김 — Kim, alone accounting for roughly a fifth
- 이 — Lee, also romanised Yi or Rhee
- 박 — Park or Bak
- 최 — Choi
- 정 — Jeong or Chung
Sharing a surname implies no relation whatsoever, which is why a surname alone is close to useless for identifying anyone. Given names are usually two syllables chosen for their meaning, and relatives of the same generation sometimes share one of them — a 돌림자 (dollimja), or generation character. Romanisation is a family's own choice rather than a rule.
Nobody Will Call You by Your Given Name Alone
A bare given name is reserved for close friends of the same age or younger, and for children. Using it for a colleague, a shopkeeper or a new acquaintance sounds abrupt. The default is to attach something to it.
씨 (ssi) is the general-purpose polite suffix, attached to a full name or a given name: 인아 씨 (Ina-ssi). One trap is worth flagging. Attaching 씨 to a bare surname — 김 씨 (Kim-ssi) — is not the neutral "Mr Kim" it looks like in translation, and reads as curt. Use the given name or the full name instead. 님 (nim) is the more deferential suffix, attached to roles and to usernames online rather than to people directly.
Titles Are Used Instead of Names
In most settings people are addressed by their role rather than their name at all. 선생님 (seonsaengnim) literally means teacher but works as a broadly respectful title for any adult whose position you are unsure of, and is what you would use for a doctor or a lawyer. 사장님 (sajangnim) is the owner of a shop or restaurant. 기사님 (gisanim) is a driver. In an office, job rank replaces the name almost entirely, and colleagues who have worked together for years may rarely say each other's names aloud.
Kinship terms also extend to strangers, which reads oddly in English but is completely ordinary in practice. A middle-aged woman running a restaurant is commonly addressed as 이모 (imo), literally "mother's sister." 아저씨 (ajeossi) and 아주머니 (ajumeoni) cover middle-aged men and women more generally. If none of this feels natural yet, 저기요 (jeogiyo) — roughly "excuse me" — gets anyone's attention without committing you to a title. More of these first-contact phrases are in the post on Hangul and your first Korean phrases.
Addresses Are Road Names Now
For most of the twentieth century Korea used a lot-number system, 지번 (jibeon), in which an address identified a registered land parcel rather than a position on a street. Parcels were numbered in the order they were registered, not in the order they appear along a road, so consecutive numbers could sit nowhere near each other. The road-name system, 도로명주소 (doromyeong juso), replaced it as the legal standard in 2014.
A road-name address runs largest unit to smallest: city, then district (구, gu), then the road, then the building number. Roads ending in 로 (ro) are the larger arteries; a 길 (gil) is a smaller street branching off one. Building numbers are assigned by distance along the road, odd on one side and even on the other, so the number itself now tells you roughly where you are standing. Postcodes are five digits.
Floors are written with 층 (cheung): 3층 is the third floor, 지하 1층 (jiha il-cheung) the first basement level. Many buildings label the fourth floor F rather than 4, because 사 (sa) sounds like the word for death.
Why the Driver Still Wants a Landmark
Give a taxi driver a road-name address and it will usually work, because the navigation systems all run on it. Give it to a driver who has worked the same district for thirty years and you may still get a follow-up question, because that driver spent most of a career navigating by 동 (dong) neighbourhood names and by landmarks, and road names are the newer layer sitting on top.
The practical move is to name the nearest well-known thing — a subway station exit, a department store, a hospital, a large intersection — and then give the address. Showing the address on your phone screen works better than pronouncing it, and holding up a navigation app with the destination already set removes the problem entirely. Station exits are the most reliable landmarks of all, which is one more argument for the approach set out in the public transport guide.
