[schreiaj]

Interestingly, this is how I was always taught to think of numbers. Beads on a stick represent all numbers. 1 bead is 1. A ten is therefore a stick with 10 beads on it. A hundred is 10 tens (in a square). A thousand is 10 hundreds stacked on top of each other (or 10 "10 tens" in a cube).

This really made it simple to think of things like carrying (oh, that's just breaking the wire holding the beads together) and squaring/rooting (since 100 was a square of 10 it was trivial). It provided an interesting method of multiplication too (simply align two numbers orthogonally and fill in the grid). I still think in terms of this now.

Incidentally, when I learned Japanese many years later it felt more natural than saying twenty-two or the abomination that is seventeen.