I get asked this fairly often: Why do Koreans want to know your age when they first meet you?
Honestly, we don’t have to ask, and the reason differs from situation to situation. Sometimes I’m just curious.
When I was younger, it never really occurred to me that asking might be rude. At school, everyone around me was roughly my own age, so it barely came up — and adults were obviously adults. That held for a while into my twenties, too. Then I started meeting people across a much wider range of ages, and it became harder to guess someone’s age just by looking.
Looking back, the times I asked were mostly when I met someone in a casual setting and wanted to get a little closer. I just didn’t know what to call them.
So if it’s someone I’ll probably only see once, I don’t ask. But if it looks like we’ll keep meeting, knowing each other’s age makes it easier to know what to call each other.
Knowing someone’s name doesn’t tell you what to call them
Korean doesn’t really have a word like “you” that feels natural across all kinds of relationships. So even if I know someone’s name, figuring out how to address them can be a separate question.
Once you’re close enough to use familiar terms, what you call an older person usually depends on both your gender and theirs.
A man calls an older man 형 hyeong and an older woman 누나 nuna. A woman calls an older man 오빠 oppa and an older woman 언니 eonni. Once you’re on casual-speaking terms, you often just use the name of someone your age or younger — 은지야 Eunji-ya, 지훈아 Jihun-a.
But I think the easiest option is to put 님 nim after the person’s name: 은지 님, 지훈 님. You don’t have to think too much about gender or the age gap, and it feels neither too close nor too distant. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with sticking to 님. But as people get closer, terms like 형 or 언니 can start to feel warmer and more natural.
Still, it all depends on the person and the dynamic. Even with a large age gap, people may still end up calling each other 형, 누나, 오빠, or 언니. On the other hand, if you’ve called someone 님 from the beginning, suddenly switching to 언니 can feel awkward in its own way. So it’s less a fixed set of rules than something you work out in the moment. This is partly where 눈치 nunchi comes in — sensing the situation and adjusting accordingly.
These days, I ask what year someone was born instead
These days, I tend to ask what year someone was born rather than how old they are. There are two reasons.
The first is that I’ve reached an age where I can’t always work out exactly how old I am on the spot. Haha. And what people usually want to know isn’t the exact number anyway. They mostly want to know whether I’m older, younger, or the same age as them.
The second is the confusion caused by Korean age and international age being used side by side. When someone around my age gives me a number, I can’t always tell which system they’re using.
So it’s much simpler to ask:
몇 년생이에요? — Myeot nyeonsaeng-ieyo? — “What year were you born?”
Speaking casually is a different question
Calling someone 형 or 언니 doesn’t mean you immediately start speaking to them in 반말.
반말 banmal, the casual form of speech, usually begins after you ask whether it’s okay, or the other person tells you:
편하게 말하세요. — Pyeonhage malhaseyo. — “Feel free to speak casually.”
So whether you use 반말 isn’t decided by age alone. It’s something you decide together.
The same applies even when two people are the same age. Some naturally start using 반말 once they become close, while others feel more comfortable continuing to use 존댓말 jondaenmal, the polite form of speech.
Something funny happened to me recently.
I have a non-Korean friend who is a few years older than me. They speak Korean well and recently told me they had started learning 반말. By then, I felt that we had become fairly close, so I asked if I could speak casually to them. They said yes.
But 존댓말 is so ingrained in them that they still speak politely to me. So we’ve ended up in this unusual arrangement where I, the younger person, use casual speech, while my older friend continues to use polite speech with me. It’s the opposite of how this usually goes, and it made me laugh.
Sometimes I wonder if the line between 반말 and 존댓말 really needs to be quite so sharp. The polite form does help people stay courteous with each other — but in the end, maybe what matters is how you treat someone rather than which form you use.
So far I’ve mostly been talking about people you meet socially, though work wasn’t all that different. I spoke casually with close colleagues who joined the company around the same time I did. With everyone else, we used workplace titles and spoke in 존댓말.
If a Korean has ever asked your age and caught you off guard, I hope it helps to know that they may simply have been wondering what to call you. That said, these days I don’t feel that age matters all that much, so I tend not to ask first — whether the other person is Korean or not.