Why Koreans ask what year you were born

Korean age system and peer groups

• Commenters note the recent legal abolition of “Korean age,” but emphasize its lingering social role: everyone born in the same calendar year is treated as the same age, with status and drinking eligibility synchronized.
• This creates stable lifelong peer cohorts and reduces frictions where one friend briefly becomes “older” by Western counting.
• A separate “빠른” system (kids born Jan–Feb who enter school early) complicates things: they socially align with the previous year, creating edge cases where one person is simultaneously senior and junior across friend groups (“족보 브레이커,” pedigree breaker).
• Some see the system as a practical “hack” that smooths strict hierarchy; others find the mental gymnastics absurd.

Hierarchy, respect, and criticism

• Many see the age hierarchy as deeply tied to Confucian values: respect for elders, deference, and fixed roles in speech (honorific vs casual forms).
• Several posters from East Asian backgrounds express strong dislike: they describe age being weaponized to talk down to younger people, hinder accountability, and stifle innovation.
• Others defend age-based respect as a cultural choice with benefits like cohesion and clarity, arguing outsiders overstate its harms or show “cultural superiority bias.”
• The thread links “high power distance” to historic airline accidents and discusses Crew Resource Management as a partial fix, while others caution against oversimplifying complex disasters as purely cultural.

Honorifics, pronouns, and names across cultures

• Large part of the discussion compares similar issues elsewhere: French tu/vous, German du/Sie (and capitalization), Italian tu/lei, Spanish usted/don/señor, Brazilian você/tu/senhor, English sir/ma’am, and historic English thou/you.
• Many describe generational shifts toward informality (e.g., Swedish “du-reform,” first-name workplace cultures, IT norms), but also confusion and anxiety over when formality is still expected.
• There is widespread frustration with software forcing “first/last name” and gendered titles; some advocate a neutral “what should we call you?” field, others prefer dropping faux-personalization entirely (“Hello,” not “Dear Bob”).
• Multiple anecdotes show misfires: being scolded for using informal pronouns in German, being offended by first-name email greetings, or, conversely, finding titles elitist and surname-only address “uniquely stupid.”

Workarounds and adaptations

• In Korea, some workplaces and hobby communities adopt English names or nicknames to sidestep hierarchical speech rules, with mixed success.
• Younger Koreans reportedly default more to legal (Western) age and are less rigid about honorifics, but older norms still heavily shape dating, friendships, and workplace interactions.