In South Korea, age is counted differently: once a baby is born, it is considered one year old. Every new year (January 1st) the same baby already marks the second year, which means that someone born in December can reach the twoyear mark in a few weeks of life.
In practice, the country has three different systems for counting a person’s age: there is an international system that uses a person’s date of birth; the official method, in which babies are born at the age of 0 and gain a year every January 1st, and the “Korean age” method, which is the most widely used, in which everyone is automatically one year old at birth and one year old is older on New Year’s Day, regardless of birth date.
This means that a person born on December 30, 1995 would be 28 years Korean, 26 years International and at the same time 27 years old. This tradition of age calculation began in China and has been part of the culture of various parts of Asia, but South Korea is the only country that still maintains it.
South Korea has its own way of counting ages (Image: Twenty20photos/envato)
Maybe not even for long. The country intends to abolish this method, which is already having some social and even economic consequences due to ongoing confusion and disputes over age calculation for social, pension and other administrative benefits.
This confusion was particularly acute during the pandemic, as public health officials used international age and Korean age interchangeably to define the age range for COVID19 vaccine eligibility. The idea of inventing a standard is not entirely new, however. Draft laws have been circulating in South Korea since 2019.
Source: BBC, Insiders
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