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As a French speaker, you don’t tend to see those as multiplication You associate “quatre vingt” as meaning 80. In your head it’s 80. You don’t think four times

As a French speaker, you don’t tend to see those as multiplication You associate “quatre vingt” as meaning 80. In your head it’s 80. You don’t think four times twenty. So it’s not as complicated as it looks. I don’t see kids really getting that wrong.

detaro 5y ago
As someone who only had basic high-school "French as a third language" and was never good at it, I'd still agree with that. it's one "symbol" so to speak for mental parsing.
fantod 5y ago
Yup, a friend of mine learning French a few years ago asked me how I, as a native French speaker, deal with this problem. I didn't understand what he was talking about because I had never in my life even noticed it. Learned how to count before I learned how to multiply, after all.
emilecantin 5y ago
It's even funnier when you're learning multiplications and divisions. We still have to think when we do 4 times 20, and every time we realize it's right there in the name.
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
I get that. It's the power of the brain's user of generalizations, i.e., patterns or classes, to represent things. The brain clearly also handles disambiguation far better than we consciously know to do. It seems like the brain essentially has a class named quatre vingt and it has a pattern of 4*20 that resolved to the concept of 80 which means 20+20+20+20. It clearly comes from a lack of having a separate term for 80 or even 90 for that matter the way that German and English do; which I find peculiar too, considering that French a Romance language (not the heart romance), while the people are largely Germanic in origin, i.e., the Franks. It makes sense when you consider how the roman numeral system functions and that the Franks were in far closer proximity to Rome than the Germans, including the ones that moved to the British isles and became the English, i.e., Anglos and the Saxons, Germans. It seems that those interplays and intersections with the cultures are what determined how French language numbering worked based on when and where and what they had contact with.
saiya-jin 5y ago
80 maybe, but 91-99 are properly ridiculous. Sure its easy to get it, but it highlights deeper issue I've had since I've started learning french - its not elegant nor easy language, rather a 'spaghetti code' one, a mess of rules and tons of exceptions, and many things defy logic and are there 'because its like that and you have to memorize it'. You can have great talk on B1 level for example in English or German, with French you are still often lost quickly unless everybody else tries hard to dumb it down for you. There is an institute in France hose sole purpose is to guard language, I wonder why they didn't find the motivation to clean it up a bit. It would make it much more attractive for outsiders and make it more global. And its not just me, literally everybody I speak to who attempted to learn french has similar experience. Either they suck it up, face often humiliation from native speakers from their mistakes (its quite something to see senior banking colleagues laughing like little kids and pointing finger at you on a project meeting because you mixed gender of a noun) or often just give up.
- aktau 5y ago
  This was cleaned up in the Belgian variant of French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_French. - 70 = septante (versus soixante-dix, which is 60-10) - 80 = huitante (versus quatre-vingt, which is 40-20), *EDIT*: wrong, see below. - 90 = nonante (versus quatre-vingt-dix, which is 40-20-10) The article also mentions something interesting I didn't know: > The use of septante for "seventy" and nonante for "ninety", in contrast to Standard French soixante-dix (literally "sixty-ten") and quatre-vingt-dix'("four-twenty-ten"). Those former words occur also in Swiss French. Unlike the Swiss, however, Belgians never use huitante for quatre-vingts ("four twenties"), with the use of octante in the local Brussels dialect as being the only exception. Although they are considered Belgian and Swiss words, septante and nonante were common in France until around the 16th century, when the newer forms began to dominate.[4] *EDIT*: This doesn't appear to be true, Belgian French speakers also say quatre-vingt for 80.
  - benhurmarcel 5y ago
    It’s the Swiss who fixed it and say huitante. The Belgians say quatre-vingt like the French.
mr_toad 5y ago
The English Eighty comes from proto-Germanic and means eight groups of ten.

detaro 5y ago

As someone who only had basic high-school "French as a third language" and was never good at it, I'd still agree with that. it's one "symbol" so to speak for mental parsing.

fantod 5y ago

Yup, a friend of mine learning French a few years ago asked me how I, as a native French speaker, deal with this problem. I didn't understand what he was talking about because I had never in my life even noticed it. Learned how to count before I learned how to multiply, after all.

emilecantin 5y ago

It's even funnier when you're learning multiplications and divisions. We still have to think when we do 4 times 20, and every time we realize it's right there in the name.

frankfrankfrank 5y ago

I get that. It's the power of the brain's user of generalizations, i.e., patterns or classes, to represent things. The brain clearly also handles disambiguation far better than we consciously know to do. It seems like the brain essentially has a class named quatre vingt and it has a pattern of 4*20 that resolved to the concept of 80 which means 20+20+20+20. It clearly comes from a lack of having a separate term for 80 or even 90 for that matter the way that German and English do; which I find peculiar too, considering that French a Romance language (not the heart romance), while the people are largely Germanic in origin, i.e., the Franks. It makes sense when you consider how the roman numeral system functions and that the Franks were in far closer proximity to Rome than the Germans, including the ones that moved to the British isles and became the English, i.e., Anglos and the Saxons, Germans. It seems that those interplays and intersections with the cultures are what determined how French language numbering worked based on when and where and what they had contact with.

saiya-jin 5y ago

80 maybe, but 91-99 are properly ridiculous. Sure its easy to get it, but it highlights deeper issue I've had since I've started learning french - its not elegant nor easy language, rather a 'spaghetti code' one, a mess of rules and tons of exceptions, and many things defy logic and are there 'because its like that and you have to memorize it'. You can have great talk on B1 level for example in English or German, with French you are still often lost quickly unless everybody else tries hard to dumb it down for you. There is an institute in France hose sole purpose is to guard language, I wonder why they didn't find the motivation to clean it up a bit. It would make it much more attractive for outsiders and make it more global. And its not just me, literally everybody I speak to who attempted to learn french has similar experience. Either they suck it up, face often humiliation from native speakers from their mistakes (its quite something to see senior banking colleagues laughing like little kids and pointing finger at you on a project meeting because you mixed gender of a noun) or often just give up.

aktau 5y ago
This was cleaned up in the Belgian variant of French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_French. - 70 = septante (versus soixante-dix, which is 60-10) - 80 = huitante (versus quatre-vingt, which is 40-20), *EDIT*: wrong, see below. - 90 = nonante (versus quatre-vingt-dix, which is 40-20-10) The article also mentions something interesting I didn't know: > The use of septante for "seventy" and nonante for "ninety", in contrast to Standard French soixante-dix (literally "sixty-ten") and quatre-vingt-dix'("four-twenty-ten"). Those former words occur also in Swiss French. Unlike the Swiss, however, Belgians never use huitante for quatre-vingts ("four twenties"), with the use of octante in the local Brussels dialect as being the only exception. Although they are considered Belgian and Swiss words, septante and nonante were common in France until around the 16th century, when the newer forms began to dominate.[4] *EDIT*: This doesn't appear to be true, Belgian French speakers also say quatre-vingt for 80.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  It’s the Swiss who fixed it and say huitante. The Belgians say quatre-vingt like the French.

mr_toad 5y ago

The English Eighty comes from proto-Germanic and means eight groups of ten.