Tuesday 26 February 2013

Counting in Chinese

Did I mention that learning Chinese is really hard?  Well, thankfully counting is pretty easy.  Once you've learned to count from 0 to 10:

零, 一, 二, 三, 四, 五, 六, 七, 八, 九, 十。

(ling, yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi)

From there you just assemble the pieces into larger numbers:  21 is 二十一 (two ten one), 45 is 四十五 (four ten five) and so forth.  A hundred is 百 (bai), a thousand is 千 (qian) and ten thousand is 万 (wan).  A million is 一百万 (a hundred wan), 等等 (etc).

Once you can count you also know the names of all the days and weeks.

A week is 星期 (xing qi), so the days of the week are 星期一, 星期二, 星期三, 等等。

A month is 月 (yue), so the months are 一月, 二月, 三月, 等等 up to 十二月。

The year, time of day and phone numbers are similarly easy.  (Except there's another word for 2 when you're counting something, another word for 1 in phone numbers, 2 different names for Sunday, a whole different set of characters for writing on cheques, and I'm sure lots of other exceptions that I haven't even learned yet.  Groan, time for a nap.)

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