The Korean approach is still wrong, arguably. If you want to include the totality of the life of the baby, the next normal stopping point would be conception. That would make the child ~9 months old, not 1 year.
In practice, you normally don't know the exact date of conception, you can only roughly estimate, but any estimate is likely to be a few days out. There are exceptions – e.g. IVF, or the parents know they only did it once and remember the exact date they did it on (but their memories may be fallible, etc). Birth is better because (in developed countries where babies are normally born in hospital) the bureaucracy almost always knows the exact date every person was born – in many cases even the time of day, not that anyone really cares about that.
Plus, any proposal like that is inevitably going to get mixed up with the politics of abortion, which is another reason why it won't happen.
The Korean approach does not account for preconception well at all. It counts the number of calendar years a person has been present for postpartum.
A person's Korean age starts at 1 sal, and increments at New Years. A baby could be born on December and be 2 sal by January. A baby born in January would be 1 sal until next year, and be considered 1 sal younger than the December baby, even though they were only born 1 month apart. Everyone born in the same calendar year is in the same age cohort.
skissane|2 years ago
Plus, any proposal like that is inevitably going to get mixed up with the politics of abortion, which is another reason why it won't happen.
wzdd|2 years ago
ChrisHyung|2 years ago
A person's Korean age starts at 1 sal, and increments at New Years. A baby could be born on December and be 2 sal by January. A baby born in January would be 1 sal until next year, and be considered 1 sal younger than the December baby, even though they were only born 1 month apart. Everyone born in the same calendar year is in the same age cohort.
Qem|2 years ago