Most of us in Western countries are familiar with the most common way to count age: it goes up by one year exactly on your birthday. For instance, if you have been alive for 3 years and 11 months, you are considered 3 years old. You will turn 4 on your birthday next month. It is a very simple, straightforward system!

Different Cultural Ways to Count Years 

Did you know that not everyone counts their age the same way? In some cultures, people might talk about age either by counting the years lived or by counting the current year of their life. So, a person who is “twenty years old” is the same as someone “in their twenty-first year of life.”

An interesting example is the Traditional Chinese Age System. In it, babies are considered 1 year old right from birth! What is even more astonishing is that everyone’s age grows not on their birthday, but on the Traditional Chinese New Year. So, a baby born just one day before the New Year would, in two days, turn 2 years old, having lived for only 48 hours!

Dealing with Tricky Dates and Months 

Sometimes, deciphering the age down to the months and days gets a little tricky, especially when dealing with the ends of months because months have different lengths: 28, 29, 30, or 31 days.

For example, how would you work out the period between 28th February and 31st March?

One reasonable way is to say, February 28th to March 28th equals one full month. The extra days remaining until the 31st of March make the total one month and 3 days.

Another way is to focus on the end-of-month dates: If you consider both Feb 28th and Mar 31st as ‘end of month’ markers, you might simply say the gap is one month. This sort of confusion pops up with dates like April 30th to May 31st, too, since the number of days in months is uneven. We stick with the first method for our calculations since it gives the clearest breakdown of time: Feb. 28 to Mar. 28 = 1 month, plus extra days.