Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by iopq 805 days ago
interestingly, in Chinese you would say 1k1h8 when pronouncing the numbers
1 comments

But then they have that annoying rule about saying a "zero" when there is a 0 for a magnitude between non-zero digits, for example 108 is one-hundred-zero-eight.
That's because in Chinese it's the higher digit having priority in emissions - if you don't specify zero the it means 180
Yeah that is weird. Because usually a "十" would mark the ten-count anyway, so saying a single digit could only be the ones-count, but they interpret it then differently to mean 80, even if you do not say "十". To me this is not logical and is unintuitive.
It's actually much easier

When people say in English one hundred thousand one thousand and ten, you will need to visualize the digits

101,010

But in Chinese you say 10 * 10^4, 1 * 10^3, 0, 1 * 10

the zero helps you write a zero after the second one without making a mistake