Comment by wccrawford
4 days ago
As an obvious foreigner, you are 100% exempt from all this. In fact, if you get it right, it'll make them feel weird and they'll try to avoid that.
I read a story once about someone who went to McDonalds in Japanese, and the clerk flipped the menu to the English side. The person flipped it back over, and the clerk flipped it to English again! They simply couldn't believe the foreigner could read it.
And I've read stories of people who didn't act like a "gaijin" (foreigner) and people didn't know how to interact with them, and the person finally just accepted it and acted like they expected a gaijin to act, and then everything was fine.
Seriously, just go. They were incredibly nice to us while we were there visiting.
> As an obvious foreigner, you are 100% exempt from all this. In fact, if you get it right, it'll make them feel weird and they'll try to avoid that.
Are you sure? In Korea, everyone who seriously cares about this stuff absolutely prefer it if you get all of it right. Of course, plenty of people (probably most under 30) secretly hate it and are therefore thankful if you don't get it right as it gives them a semi-out to be slightly more loose as well.
> I read a story once about someone who went to McDonalds in Japanese, and the clerk flipped the menu to the English side. The person flipped it back over, and the clerk flipped it to English again! They simply couldn't believe the foreigner could read it.
> And I've read stories of people who didn't act like a "gaijin" (foreigner) and people didn't know how to interact with them, and the person finally just accepted it and acted like they expected a gaijin to act, and then everything was fine.
Not trying to be rude but this pretty much tells me your first claim is likely wrong. Plenty of the exact same stories abound about Korea, especially online, yet they're both outdated and very cherry-picked. They're real, they happen (I've experienced them myself), but 99% of people would strongly prefer it if you were fluent in the language and followed every procedure as "normally" as possible.
They aren't going to live there. They're going as tourists.
If you want to live there, in standard apartments and jobs, then yes, people are going to be annoyed constantly by all the things you do 'wrong'.
But as a tourist or visitor of any kind, all those misdeeds are easily forgiven, and they can even enjoy the difference.
Japan and South Korea are different countries.
They are, but they have in common that a huge portion of things written about them online in English - especially about these cultural subjects - are very outdated or otherwise unrepresentative. Like I said, most of that comment is written all the time about SK too, and they're effectively untrue. There would need to be strong evidence that such reports about Japan are any different.