this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Korea
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Place for friendly discussion of anything related to life in South Korea! 한국에서의 생활과 관련된 모든 것에 대한 대화를 나눌 커뮤니티입니다!
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This is one of those things you would think is not a problem in a highly technological country like South Korea.
In Korea more than 90℅ of names are like this:
In Hangul, the Korean Alphabet you write characters in groups of sillables.
Examples:
All the forms, digital and analog assume that your name is something like that. There are very few which have one additional sillables.
When a foreigner comes, their last name has already three sillables like mine Pa-ra-dies, and then they have often a first name like Jee-na and a middle name like Cae-sar.
Mine already doesn't fit on my Alien Registration Card so they had to split my middle name into two lines so awkwardly they added a dash Caes-
ar.
Now the people at the phone company put the dash into my name. But because you use your phone contract to log in to the tax website I have to put in the wrong name and then the system tells me that the name is not registered with the tax buero and I can't log in.
That means I can't do my taxes, I can't order parental leave money, and so on.
I found a workaround with my bank because they put my name in without the dash into their system.. So I have to create a financial certificate on my phone, transfer it to my computer (and it only works on Windows so I have to start a virtual machine for it) and then I can log in and do my taxes.
Nothing is offered in English, so you have to rely on google translate in your phone and take a picture and then translate it there ^^.
Anyway, those are only a handful of problems you have as a foreigner. There are many more like that you have to pay daycare out of pocket while Koreans get it played but you still pay the same taxes as them and so forth.
Agree with everything that you explain, having a long name is very tricky here.
I see you started posting to [email protected] while I'm trying to get [email protected] which is hosted in Korea and for Korean + English ^^.
That is absurdly burdensome for foreigners! Sounds like the Korean govt should hire you as a consultant to assist