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Counting in the wrong language

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Re: Counting in the wrong language

#41

Post by raverbashing »

acomjean wrote: post #29
pluma wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The number pairing trick is use to not flip numbers. But I can see how it would be annoying in german. As weird as the german digit flip is, French I understand is worse with the number names, actually involving math.

French is annoying but it is "in the right order" (and the Swiss did away with that foolishness ;) )

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#42

Post by alistairSH »

pluma wrote: post #10
cyborgx7 wrote: post #2

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 i…

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.

Why? Isn't 240 zwei hundret vierzig?

Not trying to be difficult... from what little I remember of my 2 years of college German, zwei und vierzig is 42.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#43

Post by hervature »

otikik wrote: post #13

I thank the French for the metric system. But their numbers between 70 and 100 are bonkers. 70 is pronunced "60 10". 71 is "60 11". And so on until 80, which is pronounced, obviously, "4 20". 81 is "4 20 1". It goes up to 90, which is "4 20 10". 91 is "4 20 11". The craziness continues until 100, which is, thankfully, a different word ("cent", instead of "4 20 20", or, dear lord, "60 40"). But in 170 it all comes bac…

French speaking Canadian, I still say soixante-dix, quatre-vingt, and quatre-vingt-dix.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#44

Post by jedberg »

My wife learned Cantonese as her first launguage and English as her second. I learned Cantonese in college. It’s way easier to count in Cantonese because it is so regular.

As a bonus, a native asian language speaker effectively has to learn place value at a very young age to learn how to count.

My wife learned all of her math skills in English, but she still sometimes counts in Cantonese. When we play blackjack, if I’m taking too long she’ll tell me the value of my cards in Cantonese, because she’s adding them in her head in Cantonese.

It’s just quicker.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#45

Post by hervature »

Razengan wrote: post #30

This brings up a point that has always eerily intrigued me: Can you even count at all -without- a language? Visually, you might be able to do it; e.g. seeing a clump of 5 trees and knowing it’s 5 without having to “say” “five” in your head. But try tapping on the desk or clapping your hands and counting how many times you did it without saying/thinking “1, 2, 3, 4...” I wonder if associating a transient stream of inp…

Isn't clapping five times enough to count to five? Like saying "one" five times would be enough to convey to me that you mean five.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#46

Post by Swizec »

ajuc wrote: post #21
ken wrote: post #12

A simpler problem is months. The English system uses arbitrary names, while Japanese/Chinese/Korean just call them "1-month", "2-month", etc. Even though I grew up with it, I find the English system impenetrable. Quick, what's 3 months before November? I have to count it out every time. (In mod 12, -3 is the same as +9, so I just count forward 9 months.) The names of the months are a nice nod to our Roman history but…

In Polish months are named after plants that bloom then and weather conditions. Quite poetic to say "I will meet you on the 5th day in the month of linden trees" :) The funny thing is that other Slavic countries use similar names but some are moved 1 month back or forth because flowers bloom earlier/later there :) And days of the week are simply numered starting with sunday = "niedziela" (not working day), "poniedzia…

In Slovenia we used to have the old Slavic names for months, but somewhere around my or my parent’s generation they completely died in favor of roman months.

My grandpa is still fluent in them, my parents knew about them and probably knew how to use them once upon a time, I know them as something you see on very old calendars and a curiosity we learned about in kindergarten.

All I remember is that my birthday month, October, is called listopad because it’s when leaves fall down

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#48

Post by skrebbel »

I'm Dutch, and I've effectively made this change. Our number system sucks (though not as bad as the Danish one - which is my wife's language so I'm regularly forced to decipher that mess), whenever someone says a number like 47 out loud, I have to think hard about whether it's 47 or 74.

So I've decided to generally stop doing maths in Dutch. Our company is international so we all work in English anyway so when I do stuff in eg Excel, calc.exe etc, I just count in English. When I speak in Dutch, I generally simply avoid the last digit in large-ish numbers. Eg I don't care what language I say "250" in, but when I'm speaking Dutch I'd round "252" to "about 250", which is fine enough in most contexts.

FYI fun trivia: Norway fixed this about their language. They used to do what the Danes do but now it's like in English etc. They not only made up normal proper words for eg "50" or "90", but also reversed 2-digit numbers, eg "42" in Danish is "to-og-fyrre" and in modern Norwegian it's "førti-to". That's a pretty ballsy way to change a language and I'm jealous.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#49

Post by gumby »

What an absurd Sapir-Whorfian argument. The English ten words are the same as the Chinese (e.g. “forty” is clearly “four-tens” with the corners knocked off). If summing two-digit numbers is slower for some cohort of kids it’s more likely the school system than language. For example german-speaking kids have a similar number system to Dutch-speaking kids but learn their multiplication tables to 20x20 rather than 12x12 as is customary in English, so can do more smaller multiplications in their head than folks raised in English.

Re: Counting in the wrong language

#50

Post by mc32 »

gumby wrote: post #49

What an absurd Sapir-Whorfian argument. The English ten words are the same as the Chinese (e.g. “forty” is clearly “four-tens” with the corners knocked off). If summing two-digit numbers is slower for some cohort of kids it’s more likely the school system than language. For example german-speaking kids have a similar number system to Dutch-speaking kids but learn their multiplication tables to 20x20 rather than 12x12…

I thought the same thing. The main difference is we don’t use “onety-X” and some of the vowel sounds are harmonized whereas in Chinese they remain in their base forms.

We also lack[1] the 10,000[2] word (but also Chinese doesn’t have the 100,000 word like some others do)

[1] that’s a near-pun.

[2] No one says myriad to mean 10,000.

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