South Koreans to get younger on paper; here's how

Where in the world can you shave a year or two off your age? South Korea -- which has just passed a set of bills to abandon its traditional system of calculating ages.

The current system, widely known as "the Korean age", recognises people as a year old at birth and also adds a year to their age every January 1 -- rather than on their birth date.

But on Thursday, Seoul's National Assembly passed bills requiring the use of the international age-counting system for official documents. It will be implemented by June next year.

The decision was made to "resolve the social confusion caused by the mixed use of age calculations and the resulting side effects", the National Assembly said in a statement.

ALSO WATCH: US, South Korea and Japan impose fresh sanctions on North Korea

Besides the Korean age system, the country also has another method mostly used to determine the legal drinking and smoking age -- it counts one's age from zero at birth and a year is added on January 1.

And it also uses the worldwide standard for some medical and legal records since the 1960s.