‘Who wouldn’t welcome getting a year or 2 younger?’: Korean law scraps age-advancing counting tradition | 24CA News

South Korea on Thursday handed legal guidelines to scrap its conventional methodology of counting ages and undertake the worldwide normal — a shift that may make its residents both one or two years youthful on official paperwork.

Koreans are deemed to be a yr outdated when born and a yr is added each Jan. 1. This is the age mostly cited in on a regular basis life.

A separate system additionally exists for conscription functions or calculating the authorized age to drink alcohol and smoke, during which an individual’s age is calculated from zero at delivery and a yr is added on Jan. 1.

Since the early Sixties, nevertheless, South Korea has for medical and authorized paperwork additionally used the worldwide norm of calculating from zero at delivery and including a yr on each birthday.

The complicated array of methods will disappear — not less than on official paperwork — when the brand new legal guidelines that stipulate utilizing solely the worldwide methodology of counting ages take impact in June 2023.

“The revision is aimed at reducing unnecessary socioeconomic costs because legal and social disputes as well as confusion persist due to the different ways of calculating age,” Yoo Sang-bum of the ruling People Power Party instructed parliament.

Jeong Da-eun, a 29-year-old workplace employee, is blissful concerning the change, saying she has all the time needed to assume twice when requested abroad about her age.

“I remember foreigners looking at me with puzzlement because it took me so long to come back with an answer on how old I was,” she mentioned.

“Who wouldn’t welcome getting a year or two younger?”

South Korean households usually maintain events about 100 days after infants are born, because it roughly equates to a yr since conception.