Bilingual Numbers

it took me quite sometime to get used to English numbers too. I remember when I first came and people asked me for phone number, I had to translate it word by word in my mind, as if it was not my number, or I was making up a fake number because I didn't want to tell them my real number, kinda awkward.

Unlike English, where large numbers are broken down by the number of thousands they have, Chinese forms numbers between 10,000 and 100,000,000 based off of how many tens of thousands they have. So we have a single word for 10k, for example. And a single word for 100million. But we don't have "billion".

So I have to do these unit conversion in my mind.

We also don't say abbreviations like "one twenty", "nineteen eighty two", as Chinese words have less syllables, there is no need for this shortcut.