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Written numbers in different languages3/10/2024 ![]() Ok, a year ago every number took me extra time because first my brain had to acknowledge what the number meant, translate and rearrange it before I spoke it out loud. With five digits (over 20.000) it's 2, 1, 3, 5 and 4: 21527 = one and twenty thousand five hundred seven and twenty. If you get to three digit numbers, you read the first digit first, then third and then second. ![]() In Danish, 52 is "to og halvtreds" = "two and fifty" (lets ignore the fact that fifty is half-three-times-twenty). Simple enough.īut when I learned Danish, I had to learn new words for the numbers and on top of that to read them in opposite order. The number 52 in Icelandic is "fimmtíu og tveir" and in English it's "fifty two". The only difference is a little "og" = "and" we put between. When I learned English, I only had to translate the words for numbers to English. He also talks about Hindi and other languages. Numberophile has also talked about different number systems in different languages where Tom Scott talks about the Danish number system, which happens to be the language I'm learning. ![]() It got me thinking how we do this when switching languages, especially when the languages deal with numbers in a different way. They cover different routes our brains read numbers, two of them being reading the number out loud without it being familiar. Numbers with Meaning on Numberophile's YouTube Channel. ![]() I stumbled upon an interesting video on how our brain reads numbers. ![]()
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