Reference
Concepts
Terms that arrive in English half-translated. Each entry gives the original script, what the word actually denotes, what it is commonly mistaken for, and the native-language terms to search if you want to go further.
All 8 entries verified
Each entry’s sources were checked against primary references on 1 August 2026 — named statutes with article numbers, named dictionaries, and papers with identifiers rather than the source categories these entries carried before. Seven of the eight required correction; two had errors in the definition itself. The corrections log records what changed.
- 996 996工作制 A working pattern of roughly 09:00 to 21:00, six days a week, associated particularly with parts of the technology sector. Widely discussed as a labour-rights issue.
- Chaebol 재벌 A large business group, typically founded and still controlled by one family, operating across many unrelated industries through circular and pyramidal shareholdings among affiliates.
- Honne and tatemae 本音・建前 A paired distinction between privately held feeling (honne) and the position one presents in a given social setting (tatemae). The pair describes a register shift, not a moral failing.
- Hukou 户口 China's household registration system, which ties a person to a registered locality and historically to an agricultural or non-agricultural classification, affecting access to schooling, healthcare and other local public services.
- Involution (neijuan) 内卷 In popular Chinese usage, intensifying competition that raises the effort required without improving the outcome — more hours, more tutoring, more credentials, for the same position. Borrowed from anthropology, where the technical sense is narrower: elaboration and intensification without qualitative transformation.
- Keiretsu 系列 A grouping of Japanese firms linked by continuing relationships rather than by a single controlling owner — mutual shareholdings and a main bank in the horizontal form, long-term supplier and distribution ties in the vertical.
- Nunchi 눈치 The practised ability to read a room: to gauge others' mood and standing quickly and adjust what you say and do accordingly. Commonly appraised in Korean as something a person has much or little of.
- Senpai and kōhai 先輩・後輩 A relational pair ordered, in schools and workplaces, by when each person entered the institution. The word literally means “one born earlier”, and the standard dictionaries also record a broader sense covering age, position and experience — but in institutional use it is entry order that decides. It carries expectations of guidance in one direction and deference in the other, and is marked in speech.