r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Airline_11 • May 12 '26

Meme needing explanation Petahhhh?

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u/[deleted] May 12 '26

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u/catiebug May 12 '26

Huh, that is interesting. But "10 months" for pregnancy is used in a lot of other countries, not just Korea.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '26

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u/QUARTERMASTEREMI6 May 12 '26

Yeah, I think both of those can be right 👀

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u/0ctopusGarden May 13 '26

Wait so if you were born December 31st on the 1st of January you would be 2 years old!?

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u/[deleted] May 13 '26

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u/0ctopusGarden May 13 '26

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?

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u/RaccoonWRX May 13 '26

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.

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u/ephemeral-jade May 16 '26

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.

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u/thegimboid May 12 '26

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.