Counting to a Hundred Million in Chinese
The Chinese number system is even more
logical than our own, which is one reason why Chinese children take to
math better than western children.
Here are the numbers from one to ten again.
(Hover your cursor over a number to remind you of how it is pronounced.
Click on any character to hear how it is pronounced by a real Chinese person.
Use your back arrow to return.)
If you can count to six, you will find the days of the week quite easy to learn.
There is no special character for eleven or twelve.
Eleven is ten one
Twelve is
If you can count to twelve, you will find the months of the year very easy to learn. I'd suggest you look at the days of the week and the months of the year before you go on to learn to count to a hundred million, which is not actually very satisfying at all.
Thirteen is
Fourteen is
Hopefully you get the idea. The pattern continues all the way to
Twenty which is
or "two" "ten"
Twenty-one is
Twenty-two is
and so on all the way to thirty.
Now take a guess about what thirty is....
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Hopefully you got it. Thirty is
Forty is
Fifty is
and so on all the way to one hundred
One hundred in Chinese is yi bai
So what would you expect fifty seven to look like?
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That's it. "five" "ten" "seven"
Now that you understand the logic of Chinese numbers, what would you expect three hundred and eighty four to look like?
384
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Of course. san bai ba shi si.
"three" "hundred" "eight" "ten" "four"
And this pattern continues all the way to a thousand, which is
I said the Chinese system is simpler than the western system, and this is true until you get to ten thousand,
which we would expect to be
10,000 but it isn't.
The Chinese have a special name and character for ten thousand.
So 100,000, our "one hundred thousand" is not
it's
or ten ten-thousands.
1,000,000 our "million" is or one hundred ten-thousands
The Chinese also have a special name for 100,000,000 or "one hundred million". It is
yi
So three million four hundred fifty two thousand seven hundred and eighty nine is?
3,452,789
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3,452,789
san bai si shi wu wan er qian qi bai ba shi jiu
Now don't expect to be able to do that in your head without a lot of practice.
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