Counting in the wrong language

As someone who went to school in spain but at home always spoke german and now lives in Germany, the number inversion is the bain of my existance (hyperbole). I can't tell you how many times I have made mistakes because of it when communicating with people, and how often I have written down number incorrectly because of it.

At some point I just want to train myself to say it the "right" way, even if it sounds wrong in german and people will look at me weirdly. But somebody has to start the trend, right?

> Of course, there are many other reasons why children from different countries might have different mathematical abilities, including how maths is taught and attitudes towards education. It’s normally hard to control for these factors when studying people from different cultures – but one language offers a fascinating solution.

I read that as: of course, we know there are other possible explanations but we won’t dive in the research literature and we’ll instead indulge ourselves in this Sapir-Whorf based article because it’s good click bait.

The only interesting fact presented is that there is a slightly performance penalty in execution (not result) on some arithmetical tasks that never happen in real life based on the way to express numbers in subject’s native language.

This doesn’t surprise me at all.

Obviously not a direct correlation, but I’ve been surprised at how critical my internal vocalization of words is to my ability to solve a word puzzle game I’ve been playing recently.

In short, my ability to find a word that matches a pattern of blank letters is almost entirely dependent on my ability to pronounce those that might fit. If the word that matches has a pronunciation that doesn’t quite fit the usual patterns, I’ll have a very hard time recognizing it.

Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious - do you have a way of remembering them? Otherwise they're all just single digits regardless of language.

Fellow German here. I find it extremely annoying when people read out numbers for me to write down and announce pairs as numbers instead of digits.

If you mean 42 and read out "zwei und vierzig" I will pause and have to figure out if you meant 240 and you know it. This kind of thing just seems almost intentionally inconsiderate because of the unnecessary ambiguity.