Yes! I’m German and I hat 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.
Comment on Fucking hell
Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 1 day 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.
ECB@feddit.org 1 day 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 1 day 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 and two and ninety”) actually makes the strategy of “everything between 0 and 99 is processed as an expression” viable, whilst I’m not so sure that would be possible if instead of 100 numerical language expressions we had 1000 or more.
(If you’re not a Franch 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)
LorIps@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It just feels weird saying it the other way tho
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 1 day 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
neatobuilds@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Phone numbers should always be said by individual digits, makes it simpler and faster to type as you’re listening
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In some languages, pairs work fine.
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 day ago
Surprisingly, even English does it correctly
Slovene@feddit.nl 1 day ago
m.youtube.com/watch?v=keFKLOb3HfY