SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea on Thursday handed legal guidelines to scrap its conventional methodology of counting ages and undertake the worldwide customary, a shift that can make its residents both one or two years youthful on official paperwork.
Koreans are deemed to be a yr previous when born and a yr is added each Jan. 1. That 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, wherein an individual’s age is calculated from zero at beginning and a yr is added on Jan. 1.
Because the early Nineteen Sixties, nevertheless, South Korea has for medical and authorized paperwork additionally used the worldwide norm of calculating from zero at beginning and including a yr on each birthday.
The complicated array of methods will disappear — at the very least 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 toward lowering pointless socioeconomic prices as a result of authorized and social disputes in addition to confusion persist as a result of alternative ways of calculating age,” Yoo Sang-bum of the governing Folks Energy Occasion advised Parliament.
Jeong Da-eun, a 29-year-old workplace employee, stated she was completely happy in regards to the change, and that she has at all times needed to suppose twice when requested abroad about her age.
“I bear in mind foreigners me with puzzlement as a result of it took me so lengthy to come back again with a solution on how previous I used to be.”
“Who wouldn’t welcome getting a yr or two youthful?” she added.
