How do you refer to multiple people with the same surname? I was wondering if Chinese people ever get confused addressing multiple people with the same last name.
For example, let's say you are at a gathering and you meet many people who are from the same family, so everyone's last name is 林. You are only acquaintances with these people so you cannot use their full name/given name/nickname. Or maybe they are all older than you so using their given name is disrespectful.
But in either case, there would be so many people called 林先生 (or another 林+title) that nobody knows who you are referring to anymore. Then how would you make it clear which person you are talking to/talking about?
In English there is less of this problem because we can use first names for acquaintances and older people but Chinese is different.
When I worked at Nankai, we had multiple 李老师s.  If there was ambiguity involved, the students would just say the teacher's full name then put 老师 at the end.  E.g. 李忠伟老师.