[yongjik]

Well, yes, and it's a pain in the ass, and I say that as a native Korean speaker who wholeheartedly loves my own language.

To see why, consider that in Korean schools, people use different registers when talking to someone one grade older. There are situations like "Joon is one year senior to me, but he's actually friends with my friend Min, who entered this college a year before me, and Joon was born on January of 1980 while I was born on November 1979; so how should I address him?"

(And it certainly contributes to the large number of old male asshats who think they can treat a store clerk like his personal servant, just because the clerk is forty years younger.)

The sooner we get rid of this ridiculous system, or at least drastically simplify it, the better, IMHO.