Re: "The" and possessives

As an American-born native speaker of Chinese, I have never been able to get this
right. If someone says yi1bai3wan4 (one hundred ten-thousands), have to sit
there and count up the zeros in my head, and I almost invariably get it wrong.
I have the same problem in reverse trying to say "one million" in Chinese.

On a side note, when someone reads off a string of numbers in Chinese, like a
phone no., I have to translate it into English in my head before can get it
straight, so I usually have to ask them to repeat several times as I translate
digit by digit. Likewise, I can't rattle off even my own phone number in
Chinese. I also have to translate, so I have to pause every few digits to
translate the next batch (or I look at the keypad :). And for some reason, I
have the same problem with "north," "south," "east," and "west." I'm otherwise
quite fluent in both English and Chinese, so I find this kind of odd.

-Weiben

On Tue, 29 May 2001, "Douglas Koller, Latin & French" wrote:

>
> 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