South Koreans could become ‘younger’ once SK changes their age system
You won’t have a hard time remembering the age of your Korean friends or your fave K-pop and K-drama stars soon. South Korea’s president-elect Yoon Suk-yeol plans to amend the law and transition from using the “Korean age” system to the internationally recognized age system instead.
According to Yonhap News, Lee Yong-ho, chief of Yoon’s transition team’s political, judicial, and administrative subcommittee said during a press conference on Monday that they are aiming to standardize the way age is counted in the country for practical reasons.
Lee explained, ‘We have experienced unnecessary social and economic costs from persistent confusion and disputes over calculating age when receiving social, welfare and other administrative services or signing or interpreting various contracts.’
Meanwhile, The Korea Herald reported there were petitions for legal age counting to be standardized. This followed after issues on health authorities who interchanged the use of international age and Korean ages to set guidelines for COVID-19 vaccine guidelines and policies.
Lee said his team would push for the new system to be executed by 2023. He said, ‘There would be much less confusion if we could have the same idea of what it means to be how old we actually are.’
In case you weren’t aware, Koreans have many forms of counting a person’s age. One of the more known ways is when they are already one year old at birth. The system rounds up the nine months a baby spent in the womb as one year, hence it’s counted as the first year of the child’s life.
Another way South Koreans determine their age is by adding another year on New Year’s Day. They can celebrate birthdays, but it won’t count as their actual age. Yup, that means regardless of when their birthday is, it won’t add up since they only age a year older every January 1st. Still confused? Read more about it here.
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Source: we the pvblic
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