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by downandout 4584 days ago
I had to spend an hour explaining our comma system to a friend that happens to be a translator. It's very difficult for people outside the US to understand our notation system.
1 comments

"We use commas to divide large integers into groups of 3 digits. Grouping is done from the right end of the number, for example: 17,000,120".

Those two rules are, to my knowledge, the entirety of the US number-commaing system. How did you spend an hour on it? It might be difficult for people to understand it before having it explained, but I wouldn't call it complex.

She just couldn't wrap her head around it. Kept going back and forth. She was trying to determine whether a number in a document she was translating meant million or billion.