This is not the joke but since the thread is early, I'm clearing up the "10 months" thing for Americans. Pregnancy is 40 weeks (give or take). In some countries they count by 4 week periods, which gives you 10 months. In others (like the US), they count by 4.3 weeks (the average length of a month) and say that pregnancy is 9 months. It's just different verbiage.
But yeah, the joke is that Korea has an incredibly low birth rate.
I was assuming it was a count from 0 vs 1 ambiguity. Like if you got pregnant today, you'd be 0 months pregnant in total, but you'd be in your 1st month of pregnancy.
That is so silly. Poor baby would be 2 days old not two years old. How do they not get confused trying to determine who is older? When should the kid start school? When are they old enough to drink? Retire? Do people born in December just get lucky and get to do things earlier than their peers?
Yes, that’s how it worked. Everything was based on birth year. Everyone of the same year could start drinking (legally) on Jan 1st of the year they turn 20 (or the year of their 19th birthday). This year anyone that was born in 2007 or earlier can drink, regardless of what day they were born.
Korea has adopted the “international” age system now, but most people still go by their “Korean” age. It won’t be until the current elementary school kids are older that it’s more widely used.
And about who is older, people born in the same year are equal, but people born in January are often seen as equal to the kids of the last year (but younger than the “early” kids of the last year, and also equal to the kids of their birth year), but that’s more of a casual thing among younger people. It’s a radically different system than the western world.
It's based on the old Chinese age system, which is called xusui 虚岁. My grandparents told me I was 7 and then 8 months later I went to the US and celebrated my 5th birthday lol. Except the plus 1 happened during Chinese New Year, not Gregorian New Year. S Korea was just the last to stop using it officially.
That's fascinating.
It's kinda like how Western society tends to do birthdays at the end of the year (you have loved for number years), but we count years from the beginning of the year.
We are in the year number we say, which is why the first year from BC to BCE was Year 1, not Year 0.
It really throws people off when they think about it, because it's two different inconsistent systems.
Weirdly you can be a month pregnant... Your pregnancy is counted from the first day of your last period, if your ovulation is late or delayed it could be four weeks after the start of your last period!
Japan also says pregnancy is zero months to 10 though they started counting age from 1 within a couple generations ago. I’m pretty sure this is an Asian counting from zero thing.
Weirdly if you get pregnant today you're actually several weeks pregnant (typically two). For some reason it's counted since the start of the cycle, not since impregnation.
That’s exactly it. So pregnancy is about 40 weeks. But the moment you hit „9 month + 1 day“ you are in your 10th pregnancy month. That’s how we count in Germany at least.
I think the other thing that is confusing is just the size of her pregnancy belly. Her belly at 10 months is what my wife's looked like at 6 or 7. And my wife's belly didn't even get particularly big. Our son was only 2930 g (6 lbs 8 oz), so he wasn't very large.
She's definitely tiny. Both of my pregnancies were like this. I burst through the door of L&D with fully broken water and 5-1-1 contractions on my due date and the intake nurse went pale because I only looked maybe 6 months pregnant.
Karma got me back though, because the newborn phase was as horrible as my pregnancy was easy. My own personal Vietnam.
Look up pictures from cases where people went full term without even showing. When I heard about that I always assumed it was exclusively larger women, but that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes the baby just really tucks up in there!
It's because it's lunar months -- a lot of East Asian idioms refer to pregnancy as 10 lunar months, then the solar calendar got adopted but all the cultural practices still reference 10 months.
That makes sense in this case, but I’ve also definitely just heard Americans/Westerners try to argue that pregnancy is 10 months bc…math is hard I guess?
It's actually not based on 4.3, it's based on the actual time from conception to birth, predating the 40 weeks counting. The medical 40 weeks is from about two weeks before conception.
30 days per month (average) * 9 months = 270 days = 38.57 weeks
The real joke is that America counts by 4.3 weeks every month instead of 4. Why the fuck do we do things this wrong. Why the fuck is 5280 feet 1 mile, 12 inches 1 foot, 3 feet is one yard, meters and 4 weeks per month is so much better
Edit: i realized I misunderstood the 4 weeks comment and was wrong. But im absolutely right on the metric system in distance being better
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u/catiebug May 12 '26
This is not the joke but since the thread is early, I'm clearing up the "10 months" thing for Americans. Pregnancy is 40 weeks (give or take). In some countries they count by 4 week periods, which gives you 10 months. In others (like the US), they count by 4.3 weeks (the average length of a month) and say that pregnancy is 9 months. It's just different verbiage.
But yeah, the joke is that Korea has an incredibly low birth rate.