Korean age, and what to call people

Two things confuse visitors about Korean social life more than anything else: everyone seems to be a different age than they should be, and nobody uses names the way you expect. Both come from the same place.

The three age systems, and which one now counts

Korea historically ran more than one way of counting age at the same time.

• 세는나이 (Korean age): you are 1 at birth, and everyone gains a year on 1 January. A baby born on 31 December is 2 years old the next day.
• 만나이 (international age): the one the rest of the world uses. You are 0 at birth and gain a year on your birthday.
• 연나이 (year age): current year minus birth year. Used for things like school year and conscription.

In June 2023 Korea standardised on 만나이 for legal and administrative purposes. Contracts, medical records, official documents: all international age. This was a real change and it removed a genuine source of confusion in paperwork.

What it did not do is change how people talk. Ask someone their age socially and a good number of people still answer in Korean age, or answer with their birth year, which sidesteps the question entirely. 연나이 also still governs school cohorts, so the people you went to school with are still the people born in your year.

Why the age matters at all

Korean grammar encodes relative status. There is no neutral register: every sentence you say picks a level of formality, and the level depends partly on relative age. So before two Koreans can comfortably have a conversation, they usually need to know who is older.

This is why the birth-year question arrives so early when meeting someone, and why it is not considered intrusive. It is not curiosity. It is working out which grammar to use.

What to call people

Using someone's bare given name is reserved for close friends of the same age or younger. Everyone else gets a title.

In a workplace, job title beats all of this. 부장님, 과장님, 팀장님 — role plus 님. Calling a manager by their name, even with 씨, reads as pointed.

The safe default for a visitor

If you are not sure, use the person's name plus 씨, or their role plus 님, and speak in the 요 form. That combination is polite without being stiff and works in nearly every situation a visitor will be in.

Do not reach for 오빠 or 형 with someone you met an hour ago. These terms carry real closeness, and using them early reads as forward rather than friendly. Wait until someone offers — and people do offer, usually explicitly: 말 놓으세요 ("you can speak casually with me").

When someone tells you to stop being formal

반말 (banmal) is the casual register. Being invited into it is a small social event, and it is normally the older person who offers.

Accepting is easy: keep using their title, drop the 요 endings. The asymmetry is normal — a younger person often keeps some formality upward even after the switch. Nobody expects a foreigner to get this exactly right, and getting it slightly wrong while clearly trying lands far better than avoiding the whole system.