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1 year agoI’ve seen no evidence of counting time in the womb. I have seen lots of non-Koreans spreading the belief around.
What happens is the moment you are born you are 1 in Old Korea Counting (OKC). 0 international.
On January 1 you are 2 in OKC and 0 international.
On your 1st birthday you are 2 in OKC and 1 international.
On the next January 1 you are 3 OKC and 1 international.
And so forth.
Source: 2 decades in Korea, Korean spouse who is happy to be younger, and a Korean child who is very disappointed to be younger. When our child was born we didn’t say they were 9 months (OKC), they were 1(OKC).
It has been explained to me as “counting the years you have been alive during”.
I believe the previous comment was about visa-holding, language teachers, such as a foreign teacher in a Hakwons.
10-15 years ago midnight runs were more prevalent because you could wait out the expiration of your visa and come back to work for for another company.
The handful of people that I knew who did this had their salaries underpaid or paid late. Sometimes they did it because the company refused to give them the correct benefits or working conditions. The treatment of foreign teachers is so bad that even current government contracts will have clauses that break the Korean labor standards.
The article is talking about actual licensed Korean public school teachers. They have a higher retention rate. But, as the article points out, they do suffer from abusive parents (and sometimes students) and a lack of support from their schools and the government for dealing with them.