110: Cultural Post #2

   The Korean language uses honorifics to reflect the relationship between speakers. People use formal language when they talk to older people, strangers, and people who are superior. When talking with someone superior in status, we always need to use a special nouns or verb endings.

   We use honorific nouns to replace regular ones. For example, for food, we use jinji instead of bap. Most of times, honorific nouns are used to refer to relatives. Suffix -nim is affixed to many terms in order to make them honorific. Furthermore, all verbs and adjectives can be converted to honorific form after adding infix -si- or -eusi-. 

   Distinguishing from formal and informal styles is important in Korean grammar, otherwise it will be impolite and disrespect talking to older people in an informal way. 

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