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My impression from having asked people about this exact problem—I meet plenty of recent immigrants here in Paris—is this goes away quickly if you have to, say,

My impression from having asked people about this exact problem—I meet plenty of recent immigrants here in Paris—is this goes away quickly if you have to, say, work a customer-facing job where handling money is part of your duties, but much slower otherwise. (Of course, you can also simulate that experience by drilling this for ten minutes a day until it becomes second nature.)

mzs 3y ago
Not really though in my personal experience. You only need to learn conventions about how to say currency values out loud because you enter the numbers at a register and it presents you with a total that you read out like, "That'll be twenty-one oh seven," or, "twenty one dollars and seven cents please." All the money handling and change making you do in numbers in your head.
- tharkun__ 3y ago
  This! Internally it's still not-English, while the result can fluently and easily be said in English. I do find however that it also depends on "when the number was remembered". For example, relatives phone numbers I remember in my head in non-English, as I learned them in that language. But my credit card number I recite in my head in English in order to write it out on order forms. And numbers for calculating and such for a very long time was still non-English but I think it's habit. In my head, nobody tells me "Sorry dude, what language is that? I can't understand a word" and so there's never any real incentive. It's also faster to do that part in your first language and only say the result out loud while thinking about words (especially entire sentences) in your first language and then translating and saying it in English makes for awkwardly long pauses or really bad sentence structure. I think that provides again more incentive to learn English sentence structure and to think in English to begin with, so that words come out "right away" as you think and formulate.

mzs 3y ago

Not really though in my personal experience. You only need to learn conventions about how to say currency values out loud because you enter the numbers at a register and it presents you with a total that you read out like, "That'll be twenty-one oh seven," or, "twenty one dollars and seven cents please." All the money handling and change making you do in numbers in your head.

tharkun__ 3y ago
This! Internally it's still not-English, while the result can fluently and easily be said in English. I do find however that it also depends on "when the number was remembered". For example, relatives phone numbers I remember in my head in non-English, as I learned them in that language. But my credit card number I recite in my head in English in order to write it out on order forms. And numbers for calculating and such for a very long time was still non-English but I think it's habit. In my head, nobody tells me "Sorry dude, what language is that? I can't understand a word" and so there's never any real incentive. It's also faster to do that part in your first language and only say the result out loud while thinking about words (especially entire sentences) in your first language and then translating and saying it in English makes for awkwardly long pauses or really bad sentence structure. I think that provides again more incentive to learn English sentence structure and to think in English to begin with, so that words come out "right away" as you think and formulate.