• Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org
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    3 days ago

    I’m German and our way of counting is genuinely stupid. 121 would translate to “onehundred one and twenty”. You’d think it’s just a matter of practice but errors related to mixing up digits are statistically more common in German speaking regions. Awesome when it comes to stuff like calculating medication dosages and such. Like it’s not a huge issue but it’s such an unneccessary layer of confusion.

    • Ziglin (they/them)@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      I’m bilingual and switch back and forth a lot between languages when I’m not home. As such I often mess this up half way through calculating something.

    • EddoWagt@feddit.nl
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      2 days ago

      Its so annoying with phone numbers as well, depending how someone pronounces is. My mom always says phone numbers in 2 digits, like 06 12 34 56 78 (06 twelve fourandthirty sixandfifty eightandseventy) and you just get confused because you want to type in the first number pronounced

    • llii@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      Yes! I’m German and I hate it. It’s also very inconvenient when entering numbers into a spreadsheet or something, because you have to know the whole number before you can start typing it.

    • ECB@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      As a non-native working in German, the numbers are one of the trickiest parts.

      My jobs generally involve a lot of math and discussions of numbers, and I often struggle with swapping numbers around in my head. Especially because when you get to bigger numbers people often switch between (or use a combination of) listing individual digits left-to-right and saying multi-digit numbers.

      The though is when you occasionally notice natives mess it up!

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        My experience living in The Netherlands (which has a similar system) as a non-native whose mothertongue is from the Romance branch is that you eventually get used to it. I think that’s because as your language skills improve you just stop interpreting the parts of the number individually and handle hearing and speaking those “nastier” blocks of two digits as if the whole block is a language expression.

        Even better the apparently flip-flopping between one way of ordering digits and another one in longer numbers (for example: “two thousand, five hundred and two and ninety”) actually makes the strategy of “everything between 0 and 99 is processed as an expression” viable (i.e. “two thousand” + “five hundred” + “two and ninenty”), whilst I’m not so sure that would be possible if instead of just memorizing 100 numerical language expressions we had to do it with 1000 or more.

        (If you’re not a French native speaker and you learn the language you might notice something similar when at some point your mind switches from interpreting “quatre-vingt” as “four twenty” to just taking it in whole block as an expression that translates to eighty)

    • UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      The older generation in Norway also uses that format. I usually tell them that we aren’t under German occupation anymore, so they should use the sensible format.

    • blackris@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      Funny thing: it is the correct way to count like that, also in english. Four-teen, eight-teen etc. They just turn that around beginning with twenty. How obscure is that shit, when you really think about it?