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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Anyone with a birth day after the transition day will become two years younger when the change goes into effect, assuming the article’s description is correct (which it may not be.)

Under the old system you were one year old at birth, and a year older at the beginning of the next year (not, as one might expect, at their next birth day.) That means at the beginning of the year on which under the more common system one would be not-yet-one, a person under the Korean system would be two (unless they were born on the first day of the year, when they would be only one.)

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Hold up... I don't mean to be critical of another countrys traditions and ways of counting, but WAT!. If you're born on say December 31st, then the very next day you're considered to be two years old?

I can't imaging that it's particular practical to think of some one who has only been alive for a few days as being two years old. It's not even useful if you think of it as the child being "in their second year". Technically true, but what are you trying to convey?

Their concept of a "two year old" is completely different from our concept. So though the words may translate the same, it's just a different definition. For them, it's equally weird to think that a child would go through a year of life being "0 years old."

It just seems like they still used the age for things like: When do you start school, when can you vote, drink and so on, all of which in my mind has always been linked to some expectation of maturity (justified or not).

If school starts a six, then some of those children could be one to two years younger than others. For adult either way seems fine, there's little difference between 35 and 37, but for the youngest children it seems like it would make a huge difference.

Under the old system, the oldest person "age 6" is still 365 days older than the youngest.

An infant born on 2022-01-01 is currently "2", the same "age" as a baby born on 2022-12-31.

The children will all still be within one year of each other, they're just making the cutoff for each year-long age cohort December 31 instead of some date in August or September like they would in the US. In practice, it makes little difference.

"0 years old" does seem weird... some part of that is probably because we seem to refer to children in their first year of life as "X months old".

> Technically true, but what are you trying to convey?

The number of winters you survived probably.

Folk descriptions of age in my corner of the world often used springs as a unit - to this day the plural form for years in my language(Polish) reads as "summers".

Ditto in Russian, and in French "spring" is sometimes used as a synonymous for "year" when talking about ages, especially in more poetic contexts.

I think I can imagine how such a system came out to be, until fairly recently keeping accurate timekeeping and even datekeeping might have been difficult, especially for isolated people. You may not have known the exact date of one's birth, but you know that it was "3 winters ago" or somesuch. You wouldn't know the precise day of one's birth, but you'd know the year and use that instead.

Oh whoops I missed that second part, that everybody's birthday is New Year's. Thanks!

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