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German here... I hate how we say numbers. Even after 36 years I still have problems with it. If I have to dictate phone numbers I'm saying each digit separately

German here... I hate how we say numbers. Even after 36 years I still have problems with it. If I have to dictate phone numbers I'm saying each digit separately because everything else is just confusing and very often leads to swapped numbers on the other end. (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical. Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we say numbers.

umpalumpaaa 5y ago
But isn’t using the “zwanzigeins” notation prone to error as well? Zwanzigeins could mean 20 1 or 21. The only thing that differentiates “20 1” from “21” is the duration of the delay between 20 and 1…
hulitu 5y ago
German is an LSB language.
FredPret 5y ago
Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too. In practice when I count, I say the full word up to 20, and then start saying “one”, “two”, until I get to thirty to save time. This feels more natural given that the full word for 21, 22, etc is “one-twenty”, “two-twenty”, etc, rather than “twenty-one” etc.
- lodovic 5y ago
  But it's the same in English up until the number 20. 16 for example, six-ten. The English just count differently after 20. But I could imagine "four and seventy" for example.
- nkrisc 5y ago
  You can do this in English or many other languages too if you want to.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too. Yeah, it's easy for you since you grew up with that system, but as an expat in Germany it is a monumental pain when someone is dictating you long numbers (telephone, social security, insurance, etc.) in groups of two over the phone and you gotta scribble them quickly on a piece of paper since you tend to write the first digit you hear, but that's actually the last of the pair you gotta write so numbers get easily mixed up. Example, dictating and writing down 23.45.67.89 in pairs over the phone, would sound like "3 ... and twenty", "5 ... and fourty", "7 ... and sixty", "9 ... and eighty" which is difficult to not fuck up and swap them when under pressure of writing quickly, if you don't count the same in your own language/culture, and you haven't agreed over the endinanness with the other party before the dictation starts. So you're left with 2 choices if the other party uses this system, either you write the first digit you hear, which is actually the last, and leave a blank space in front, so you can write the "x_ties" number when it comes up, but that only works on paper but not on a dialing pad or keyboard as the cursor keeps moving too the right, or, the other option, you wait to hear each number pair before you start writing them down, then you start writing, but that can also causes mixups in your brain during the decoding of the reverse order from hearing to writing if the other party dictates the pairs quickly. Or, you just throw in the towel and ask the other party to dictate it digit by digit and call it a day. So, apologies, as I have to disagree with you. It may work well if you're counting incrementally to keep track of something, but for transferring non-sequential numbers over the phone, this is a stupid numbering system that causes more problems than it solves.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Sounds like you just have to get used to the endianness. It’s actually more consistent; in English, you say four-teen but also twenty-four. In German, they picked the way that is most logical for counting, and stuck with it throughout.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >It’s actually more consistent In theory, yes, yet my adult brain cannot process correctly decoding this reversed order quickly, under pressure, over the phone in writing, even though I learned to be fluent in German. I guess you have to grow up with this system so it imprints on your subconscious from an early age, else, if you grow up with another system, and need to switch later in life, it's game over. Learning this number system is easy, but under pressure over the phone, this reverse pair system falls apart quickly as you tend to write the first digit you hear instead of waiting for the full pair, which is why it's not used in military/critical radio transmissions, because it opens the gates to many errors and proves the system is broken for anything else than casual private use.
moffkalast 5y ago
And it's not just German either. If you take the word 175 for example: German: einhundertfünfundsiebzig (one hundred five and seventy) Slovenian: sto petinsedemdeset (one hundred five and seventy) Which is weird when you look at all the other neighbouring languages: Polish: sto siedemdziesiąt pięć (one hundred seventy five) Czech: sto sedmdesát pět (one hundred seventy five) Slovak: sto sedemdesiat päť (one hundred seventy five) Hungarian: száz hetven öt (one hundred seventy five) Italian: centosettantacinque (one hundred seventy five) Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five) Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic You get the idea. Given that, I'm holding you Germans responsible for our also stupid number system. Sincerely, a Slovenian.
- midasuni 5y ago
  One hundred Five and Seventy is middle endian, neither big nor little. The only other example I can think of is the american date system
- mmcnl 5y ago
  Same for Dutch. Honderd-vijf-en-zeventig. Hundred five and seventy.
- solidangle 5y ago
  Dutch: honderdvijfenzeventig (hundred five and seventy)
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    Ah yep, seems like there is actually one more: Danish: hundrede femoghalvfjerds (hundred five and seventy) And the rest I've checked now: Romanian: o sută șaptezeci și cinci (hundred seventy five) French: cent soixante quinze (hundred sixty fifteen) Swedish: hundra sjuttiofem (hundred seventy five) Finnish: sata seitsemänkymmentäviisi (hundred seventy five) Norweigan: hundre og syttifem (hundred seventy five) Spanish: ciento setenta y cinco (hundred seventy five)
    - tribaal 5y ago
nathias 5y ago
Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia? We have the same way of saying numbers and I can't imagine anyone being confused by it. Its normal to just say individual digits for large numbers in any language.
- chrizel 5y ago
  > Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia? Nothing I know about, no. It's not that I don't understand it or that my head explodes. I cope with it. I grew up with this way of saying numbers, and yeah - it's the way it is, it is normal. But I think it requires a tiny little bit more brain activity than it needs to be. For me (as a software developer) I tend to prefer easier and more logical systems. And the way of saying numbers is one thing that is just more logical the way it is in English or other languages. Similarly, I don't like the way we write dates (28.11.2021) and much more prefer ISO8601 (2021-11-28). But I think this is a format people more agree on globally sooner or later with all its advantages.
  - nathias 5y ago
    Ok, so in a CS sense, why would prepending be better than appending for numbers? If there is a difference (imo there isn't because of the way we chunk thinking), but for counting appending is probably better as the significant part is first and non significant last? Same with dates, isn't it better to see the more significant info upfront? You are more likely to be confused about which day it is than which month, and about which month than which year it is.
  - slightwinder 5y ago
    ISO-date-format is only better for sorting. But for writting, the german format is far better, because it's written in order of priority and optionality. This is of course less relevant with computers today, but even for reading it still applys.
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      I do wonder why you care about optionality and priority and what those even mean and how it's better in any way. I don't think it's better at all. It's different. You remind me of a website I found way back for "learning French as a German". The site was actually pretty decent. But then it started teaching you the numbers and the clock and it started off with how the French way of saying numbers and the time is so much more logical and better than the German way. I closed the site immediately and never opened it again and I did not continue learning French at that time. Stopped right then and there. Priority and optionality do not help with parsing written dates in an internationalized context. And that is true before computers as well. 2021-02-03 is easy to parse as the 3rd of February 2021 because there's no country on earth that uses this date format to mean the 2nd of March 2021, otherwise it wouldn't help at all. I'd say that they both depend on context. Let's imagine the two of us are talking about "going camping this month". Year and month are optional. If we're talking about "going camping later this year" the year and day are optional "let's go in February". Let's say we're trying to figure out whether to "still go camping this year or next year". Now day and month are optional.
varispeed 5y ago
When I was a kid we had German as mandatory language to learn. I remember that when learning numbers we thought that the teacher is making it up and is incompetent. It took a lot of explaining that it is actually for real. Anyway, due to these things I never got to learn this language, my brain just refused to memorise these rules :/
VortexDream 5y ago
Every freaking time a German dictates a number they do it in a sane way for half the number then do the backwards way for the rest which totally trips me up. I hate it.
otagekki 5y ago
Similar to the Zwanzigeins movements, in Malagasy, we have people who'd wish to reverse the counting pronunciation, although in the public sphere it is virtually unheard of. I remember debating on forums on how practical that would be. But IMO people are so lazy they just resort to counting in French instead. Madagascar has so much other worries as of current that it's totally understandable in a way.
tgv 5y ago
> If I have to dictate phone numbers The problem also exists in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPZAXMCasI&t=154s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPZAXMCasI&t=154s
lowdose 5y ago
In Dutch it is the same way. We even have another word for billion. Billion in dutch means 1000x more than the English version. Compounding is translated as combined interest.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  English has million and milliard [0], but American English preferred the short scale and that has had more influence over the language. The UK only officially switched over to the "American" system in 1974. Many European languages have the long scale, English is the odd one out here, as is Brazilian Portugese if you'd still classify that as a European language. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale
jeroenhd 5y ago
As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time. English itself isn't all that simple either, because they still follow strange rules before reaching 20 like many other West European languages. French even stuck to its base in 20, unlike English (though "four score" is still often used to say 80 in the famous quote). The word "million", from "mille" meaning 1000, is used to express a thousand thousands. The American system also switched to the short system (million, billion, trillion instead of million, milliard, billion) and UK English has made the same switch relatively recently but only because of American influences. I don't think there's any natural or logical way of saying numbers per se. If there was, we wouldn't have been doing it "in reverse" for hundreds of years in Europe. I can't feel strongly enough about it to be for any change but forcingeeveryone to change their habits is annoying and probably costly. You can't force a change in language, language changes by itself.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  >As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time. I don't understand how that's specific to backwards numbers
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    It forces you to stop and parse the numbers because you need to invert them in your head. For me, it's the same effect as writing something down because your brain needs to process it.
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      But I mean in English you do this exactly as shown > You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five) So how does it change?
elliekelly 5y ago
Telling time in Dutch breaks my brain. Saying “it’s ten for half five” means it’s 4:20. (I think?) I’m really not sure I’ll ever have a solid understanding. Why can’t we just say the numbers? Why must we dance around them? In a game of tell me the time without telling me the time the Dutch will win every time.
- jerrre 5y ago
  I'd translate it as ten before half five, but apart from that, yeah that's 4:20 (inclusive or 16:20). I think in the UK they use half five as 5:30? Half past five basically. In NL it's half way towards five, maybe the Dutch are forward looking?
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  There are so many ways to say this in German and we mix it all the time, though some ways are more prevalent in certain areas. I'm leaving out the 'regular' version of just saying the numbers and such and there's also the fact that depending on situation (or how you feel that very second) you'll just say 4:20 or 16:20. 4:05: 5 past 4 4:10: ten past 4 4:15: quarter past 4 4:15: quarter 5 4:20: ten to half 5 4:20: 20 past 4 4:30: half 5 4:35: 5 past half 5 4:40: 10 past half 5 4:40: 20 to 5 4:45: quarter to 5 4:45: 3 quarters 5 4:50: ten to 5 5:00: "full" I'm sure I missed some from parts of Germany I've never lived in/been to. Sometimes the actual hour is implied in a question/conversation and you just want to say that it's the full hour you're talking about and just say "Voll" or "Um". Same works with "Halb" and "ten to half" if the hour is not important or implied by context, which you can't do if you just say the numbers. EDIT: speaking of forgetting some. While it's customary to say "10 past 4" usually nobody says "15 past 4" and instead uses "four fifteen" (actually "vier Uhr fuenfzehn") or "quarter past 4" and then at 4:20 it's "20 past 4 again".
  - Merem 5y ago
    In some regions it's (4:15) "Viertel nach vier" while it's also "Viertel fünf" because 4:45 is "Dreiviertel fünf", while in those some regions it's then "Viertel vor fünf". (Personally, I only use Viertel, halb and Dreiviertel, otherwise it's just "siebzehn Uhr zehn" or something.)
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical. German and English are very closely related. Grouping numbers into sets of two is common in English; it would be completely normal to vocalize 2514 as "twenty-five fourteen". Presenting numbers below 100 in little-endian order was also normal in English, though that is no longer true of modern English.
logifail 5y ago
> German here... I hate how we say numbers We have three German+English bilingual kids and maths homework can get a bit soul-destroying when you can see your child knows the numerical answer to a problem and yet instead of saying "64" says "46" (or vice versa). Our six year old even asked me - just last week - [in English] "Daddy, why do we say the numbers backwards in German?". Me: "Umm...."
DonaldFisk 5y ago
There's a nursery rhyme,Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so English wrote out numbers the same was German does. The King James version (1605) consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g. Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ... Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ... Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ... What about more recent? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we find: "About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."
DonaldFisk 5y ago
There's a nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so numbers were once written out in English the same way they are in German. I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g. Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ... Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ... Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ... What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we still find: About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..." ‘Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,’ said my aunt, as we walked back to the chariot, ‘I was married.
- chabad360 5y ago
  IIRC, the original Hebrew also writes most numbers this way.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Beat me to the blackbirds, but could it have a French source? I guess America didn’t go with “Seven and four score years ago...” though
- FearNotDaniel 5y ago
  I was at school in the north of England (Yorkshire) in the late 1970s/early 80s and there were a few schoolteachers, and some old folks, who still spoke this way.
  - switch007 5y ago
    My grandmother occasionally spoke like that too (not Yorkshire) I couldn’t figure out why she said it backwards occasionally
ajmurmann 5y ago
Even after having lived in the US for almost 15 years and only speaking English 99% of the time, dictating numbers in two-digit pairs throws me off in English because I'm still traumatized growing up with this problem.
WalterBright 5y ago
> I very much prefer English, it is much more logical First time I ever heard someone say that about English!
stefandesu 5y ago
Opened this thread to say exactly this. It wasn't a problem for me before I started using English regularly, but in the past few years, I've been getting German numbers wrong more and more often. It's just so confusing and I have to consciously think about it every time.

umpalumpaaa 5y ago

But isn’t using the “zwanzigeins” notation prone to error as well? Zwanzigeins could mean 20 1 or 21. The only thing that differentiates “20 1” from “21” is the duration of the delay between 20 and 1…

hulitu 5y ago

German is an LSB language.

FredPret 5y ago

Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too. In practice when I count, I say the full word up to 20, and then start saying “one”, “two”, until I get to thirty to save time. This feels more natural given that the full word for 21, 22, etc is “one-twenty”, “two-twenty”, etc, rather than “twenty-one” etc.

lodovic 5y ago
But it's the same in English up until the number 20. 16 for example, six-ten. The English just count differently after 20. But I could imagine "four and seventy" for example.
nkrisc 5y ago
You can do this in English or many other languages too if you want to.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>Actually I rather like it. In my first language it works like that too. Yeah, it's easy for you since you grew up with that system, but as an expat in Germany it is a monumental pain when someone is dictating you long numbers (telephone, social security, insurance, etc.) in groups of two over the phone and you gotta scribble them quickly on a piece of paper since you tend to write the first digit you hear, but that's actually the last of the pair you gotta write so numbers get easily mixed up. Example, dictating and writing down 23.45.67.89 in pairs over the phone, would sound like "3 ... and twenty", "5 ... and fourty", "7 ... and sixty", "9 ... and eighty" which is difficult to not fuck up and swap them when under pressure of writing quickly, if you don't count the same in your own language/culture, and you haven't agreed over the endinanness with the other party before the dictation starts. So you're left with 2 choices if the other party uses this system, either you write the first digit you hear, which is actually the last, and leave a blank space in front, so you can write the "x_ties" number when it comes up, but that only works on paper but not on a dialing pad or keyboard as the cursor keeps moving too the right, or, the other option, you wait to hear each number pair before you start writing them down, then you start writing, but that can also causes mixups in your brain during the decoding of the reverse order from hearing to writing if the other party dictates the pairs quickly. Or, you just throw in the towel and ask the other party to dictate it digit by digit and call it a day. So, apologies, as I have to disagree with you. It may work well if you're counting incrementally to keep track of something, but for transferring non-sequential numbers over the phone, this is a stupid numbering system that causes more problems than it solves.
- FredPret 5y ago
  Sounds like you just have to get used to the endianness. It’s actually more consistent; in English, you say four-teen but also twenty-four. In German, they picked the way that is most logical for counting, and stuck with it throughout.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >It’s actually more consistent In theory, yes, yet my adult brain cannot process correctly decoding this reversed order quickly, under pressure, over the phone in writing, even though I learned to be fluent in German. I guess you have to grow up with this system so it imprints on your subconscious from an early age, else, if you grow up with another system, and need to switch later in life, it's game over. Learning this number system is easy, but under pressure over the phone, this reverse pair system falls apart quickly as you tend to write the first digit you hear instead of waiting for the full pair, which is why it's not used in military/critical radio transmissions, because it opens the gates to many errors and proves the system is broken for anything else than casual private use.

moffkalast 5y ago

And it's not just German either. If you take the word 175 for example: German: einhundertfünfundsiebzig (one hundred five and seventy) Slovenian: sto petinsedemdeset (one hundred five and seventy) Which is weird when you look at all the other neighbouring languages: Polish: sto siedemdziesiąt pięć (one hundred seventy five) Czech: sto sedmdesát pět (one hundred seventy five) Slovak: sto sedemdesiat päť (one hundred seventy five) Hungarian: száz hetven öt (one hundred seventy five) Italian: centosettantacinque (one hundred seventy five) Croatian: sto sedamdeset pet (one hundred seventy five) Serbian: same as Croatian but in cirilic You get the idea. Given that, I'm holding you Germans responsible for our also stupid number system. Sincerely, a Slovenian.

midasuni 5y ago
One hundred Five and Seventy is middle endian, neither big nor little. The only other example I can think of is the american date system
mmcnl 5y ago
Same for Dutch. Honderd-vijf-en-zeventig. Hundred five and seventy.
solidangle 5y ago
Dutch: honderdvijfenzeventig (hundred five and seventy)
- moffkalast 5y ago
  Ah yep, seems like there is actually one more: Danish: hundrede femoghalvfjerds (hundred five and seventy) And the rest I've checked now: Romanian: o sută șaptezeci și cinci (hundred seventy five) French: cent soixante quinze (hundred sixty fifteen) Swedish: hundra sjuttiofem (hundred seventy five) Finnish: sata seitsemänkymmentäviisi (hundred seventy five) Norweigan: hundre og syttifem (hundred seventy five) Spanish: ciento setenta y cinco (hundred seventy five)
  - tribaal 5y ago

nathias 5y ago

Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia? We have the same way of saying numbers and I can't imagine anyone being confused by it. Its normal to just say individual digits for large numbers in any language.

chrizel 5y ago
> Do you have some kind of cognitive impairment like dyslexia? Nothing I know about, no. It's not that I don't understand it or that my head explodes. I cope with it. I grew up with this way of saying numbers, and yeah - it's the way it is, it is normal. But I think it requires a tiny little bit more brain activity than it needs to be. For me (as a software developer) I tend to prefer easier and more logical systems. And the way of saying numbers is one thing that is just more logical the way it is in English or other languages. Similarly, I don't like the way we write dates (28.11.2021) and much more prefer ISO8601 (2021-11-28). But I think this is a format people more agree on globally sooner or later with all its advantages.
- nathias 5y ago
  Ok, so in a CS sense, why would prepending be better than appending for numbers? If there is a difference (imo there isn't because of the way we chunk thinking), but for counting appending is probably better as the significant part is first and non significant last? Same with dates, isn't it better to see the more significant info upfront? You are more likely to be confused about which day it is than which month, and about which month than which year it is.
- slightwinder 5y ago
  ISO-date-format is only better for sorting. But for writting, the german format is far better, because it's written in order of priority and optionality. This is of course less relevant with computers today, but even for reading it still applys.
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    I do wonder why you care about optionality and priority and what those even mean and how it's better in any way. I don't think it's better at all. It's different. You remind me of a website I found way back for "learning French as a German". The site was actually pretty decent. But then it started teaching you the numbers and the clock and it started off with how the French way of saying numbers and the time is so much more logical and better than the German way. I closed the site immediately and never opened it again and I did not continue learning French at that time. Stopped right then and there. Priority and optionality do not help with parsing written dates in an internationalized context. And that is true before computers as well. 2021-02-03 is easy to parse as the 3rd of February 2021 because there's no country on earth that uses this date format to mean the 2nd of March 2021, otherwise it wouldn't help at all. I'd say that they both depend on context. Let's imagine the two of us are talking about "going camping this month". Year and month are optional. If we're talking about "going camping later this year" the year and day are optional "let's go in February". Let's say we're trying to figure out whether to "still go camping this year or next year". Now day and month are optional.

varispeed 5y ago

When I was a kid we had German as mandatory language to learn. I remember that when learning numbers we thought that the teacher is making it up and is incompetent. It took a lot of explaining that it is actually for real. Anyway, due to these things I never got to learn this language, my brain just refused to memorise these rules :/

VortexDream 5y ago

Every freaking time a German dictates a number they do it in a sane way for half the number then do the backwards way for the rest which totally trips me up. I hate it.

otagekki 5y ago

Similar to the Zwanzigeins movements, in Malagasy, we have people who'd wish to reverse the counting pronunciation, although in the public sphere it is virtually unheard of. I remember debating on forums on how practical that would be. But IMO people are so lazy they just resort to counting in French instead. Madagascar has so much other worries as of current that it's totally understandable in a way.

tgv 5y ago

> If I have to dictate phone numbers The problem also exists in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPZAXMCasI&t=154s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPZAXMCasI&t=154s

lowdose 5y ago

In Dutch it is the same way. We even have another word for billion. Billion in dutch means 1000x more than the English version. Compounding is translated as combined interest.

jeroenhd 5y ago
English has million and milliard [0], but American English preferred the short scale and that has had more influence over the language. The UK only officially switched over to the "American" system in 1974. Many European languages have the long scale, English is the odd one out here, as is Brazilian Portugese if you'd still classify that as a European language. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale

jeroenhd 5y ago

As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time. English itself isn't all that simple either, because they still follow strange rules before reaching 20 like many other West European languages. French even stuck to its base in 20, unlike English (though "four score" is still often used to say 80 in the famous quote). The word "million", from "mille" meaning 1000, is used to express a thousand thousands. The American system also switched to the short system (million, billion, trillion instead of million, milliard, billion) and UK English has made the same switch relatively recently but only because of American influences. I don't think there's any natural or logical way of saying numbers per se. If there was, we wouldn't have been doing it "in reverse" for hundreds of years in Europe. I can't feel strongly enough about it to be for any change but forcingeeveryone to change their habits is annoying and probably costly. You can't force a change in language, language changes by itself.

BoorishBears 5y ago
>As a Dutch speaker, I think of having the numbers "backwards" as a neat feature. You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five). If you verify by repeating the same numbers then there's a decent chance of introducing the exact same error the second time. I don't understand how that's specific to backwards numbers
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  It forces you to stop and parse the numbers because you need to invert them in your head. For me, it's the same effect as writing something down because your brain needs to process it.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    But I mean in English you do this exactly as shown > You can give someone a phone number (12345) and then verify it by saying it differently (twelve, thirty four, five) So how does it change?

elliekelly 5y ago

Telling time in Dutch breaks my brain. Saying “it’s ten for half five” means it’s 4:20. (I think?) I’m really not sure I’ll ever have a solid understanding. Why can’t we just say the numbers? Why must we dance around them? In a game of tell me the time without telling me the time the Dutch will win every time.

jerrre 5y ago
I'd translate it as ten before half five, but apart from that, yeah that's 4:20 (inclusive or 16:20). I think in the UK they use half five as 5:30? Half past five basically. In NL it's half way towards five, maybe the Dutch are forward looking?
tharkun__ 5y ago
There are so many ways to say this in German and we mix it all the time, though some ways are more prevalent in certain areas. I'm leaving out the 'regular' version of just saying the numbers and such and there's also the fact that depending on situation (or how you feel that very second) you'll just say 4:20 or 16:20. 4:05: 5 past 4 4:10: ten past 4 4:15: quarter past 4 4:15: quarter 5 4:20: ten to half 5 4:20: 20 past 4 4:30: half 5 4:35: 5 past half 5 4:40: 10 past half 5 4:40: 20 to 5 4:45: quarter to 5 4:45: 3 quarters 5 4:50: ten to 5 5:00: "full" I'm sure I missed some from parts of Germany I've never lived in/been to. Sometimes the actual hour is implied in a question/conversation and you just want to say that it's the full hour you're talking about and just say "Voll" or "Um". Same works with "Halb" and "ten to half" if the hour is not important or implied by context, which you can't do if you just say the numbers. EDIT: speaking of forgetting some. While it's customary to say "10 past 4" usually nobody says "15 past 4" and instead uses "four fifteen" (actually "vier Uhr fuenfzehn") or "quarter past 4" and then at 4:20 it's "20 past 4 again".
- Merem 5y ago
  In some regions it's (4:15) "Viertel nach vier" while it's also "Viertel fünf" because 4:45 is "Dreiviertel fünf", while in those some regions it's then "Viertel vor fünf". (Personally, I only use Viertel, halb and Dreiviertel, otherwise it's just "siebzehn Uhr zehn" or something.)

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical. German and English are very closely related. Grouping numbers into sets of two is common in English; it would be completely normal to vocalize 2514 as "twenty-five fourteen". Presenting numbers below 100 in little-endian order was also normal in English, though that is no longer true of modern English.

logifail 5y ago

> German here... I hate how we say numbers We have three German+English bilingual kids and maths homework can get a bit soul-destroying when you can see your child knows the numerical answer to a problem and yet instead of saying "64" says "46" (or vice versa). Our six year old even asked me - just last week - [in English] "Daddy, why do we say the numbers backwards in German?". Me: "Umm...."

DonaldFisk 5y ago

There's a nursery rhyme,Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so English wrote out numbers the same was German does. The King James version (1605) consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g. Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ... Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ... Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ... What about more recent? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we find: "About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..."

DonaldFisk 5y ago

There's a nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so numbers were once written out in English the same way they are in German. I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g. Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ... Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ... Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ... What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we still find: About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..." ‘Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,’ said my aunt, as we walked back to the chariot, ‘I was married.

chabad360 5y ago
IIRC, the original Hebrew also writes most numbers this way.
selimthegrim 5y ago
Beat me to the blackbirds, but could it have a French source? I guess America didn’t go with “Seven and four score years ago...” though
FearNotDaniel 5y ago
I was at school in the north of England (Yorkshire) in the late 1970s/early 80s and there were a few schoolteachers, and some old folks, who still spoke this way.
- switch007 5y ago
  My grandmother occasionally spoke like that too (not Yorkshire) I couldn’t figure out why she said it backwards occasionally

ajmurmann 5y ago

Even after having lived in the US for almost 15 years and only speaking English 99% of the time, dictating numbers in two-digit pairs throws me off in English because I'm still traumatized growing up with this problem.

WalterBright 5y ago

> I very much prefer English, it is much more logical First time I ever heard someone say that about English!

stefandesu 5y ago

Opened this thread to say exactly this. It wasn't a problem for me before I started using English regularly, but in the past few years, I've been getting German numbers wrong more and more often. It's just so confusing and I have to consciously think about it every time.