Re: "The" and possessives

Nik wrote:

>Henrik Theiling wrote:
>>  I never understood why Chinese people still don't put the dots every
>>  *four* digits in Arabic numbers.
>
>Because they got those numerals from the West.  So, despite the
>confusion I'm sure it must cause for learners, they group digits in
>threes.  I would think that it must make it difficult to read large
>numbers.
Whenever I've seen a Chinese or Japanese confronted with a large
number in digits, he/she inevitably has to start counting backwards
from the units column. Ergo, 100,000,000 becomes:
"unit-ten-hundred-thousand-wan-10wan-100wan-1000wan-yi, oh, so it's a
yi!"

Personally,I preferred memorizing some of the landmarks like
"million" (bai3wan4) and "billion" (shi2yi4) and backpedalling before
I became truly familiar with the system.

Kou