Cut-metal Hangul lettering mounted on a weathered red-brick facade

Language

Grammar as social distance

Why grammar shapes how people stand next to each other. In Korean you cannot finish a sentence without deciding your relationship to the listener. This section is about what that does to a conversation, and to a country.

Photo by Clark Gu on Unsplash

What this section covers

  • Honorifics Two older men kneeling across a low baduk board in a traditional Korean room

    Speech levels

    Honorifics are not politeness settings. They are a running measurement of distance, updated every sentence.

  • Untranslatable A row of hand-painted wooden boards on a timber wall, each carrying one Hangul character

    Words that do not travel

    Terms with no clean English equivalent, and what gets lost when they are translated anyway.

  • Change A shop sign reading 404 NOT FOUND hanging beside older Korean signboards

    A language in motion

    Slang, borrowed English, and the gap that opens between how two generations say the same thing.

Photos by sq lim, JIWON KANG, mindeurle lee on Unsplash

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere. Sound changes and romanisation are computed with es-hangul, an open-source library. It handles single words well; compound words can be slightly off.

Two more you can try: your lunar birthday and your Korean age.

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