South Korea to Adopt International System For Counting Someones Age

It is about time this happened because telling the age of Koreans can be difficult:

South Korea will scrap its traditional method of counting age and adopt the international standard starting Wednesday, resulting in the reduction of a person’s age by one or two years on official documents, officials said.

Under the revisions to the Civil Act and the General Act on Public Administration, multiple age systems will be unified under the internationally recognized system in which age is based on birth date, according to the Ministry of Government Legislation.

In South Korea, three age systems are currently in use.

Under the most commonly used system of so-called “Korean age,” a person turns 1 on the day they are born and adds a year on the first day of the new year. For instance, a baby born on New Year’s Eve becomes 2 years old as soon as they pass midnight.

The second system is the internationally recognized system, whereby a person’s age is determined according to their birth date, while the third system adds a year to a person’s age on the first day of the new year.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.