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Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

I'm slightly confused as a native English speaker here.

zwei und vierzig versus zwei hundert vierzig are radically different to my ears.

The counting thing is annoying but not as annoying as French numbers in my not so humble opinion. Though I guess English had it at one point with things like 4 score and 7 years ago (a score being 20 years, so 87 years ago)

Guess maybe I'm weird but outside of the "flip last two numbers around in your brain in German" it never struck me as much more than: Well that's weird, least its not french numbers under 100 where I have to add mentally so no big deal.

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French numbers are actually quite easy though if you learn even a little bit of French.

You don’t think of quatre-vingt dix as four-twenties ten, you just think of it as ninety just like in English.

I suspect the same is true even for native speakers, your brain is going to pretty quickly map to the actual number it represents rather than the arithmetic statement.

I'm thirty eight years old. I've been using standard units my entire life. They just make sense. Eight cups? Oh that's half a gallon, or two quarts. Eight ounces of melted butter? Oh that's one cup. Probably two sticks unless it's that bullshit imported European butter, ugh. My indoctrinated brain can't imagine it any other way. "You want me to add what grams.. what? Who measures sugar by weight?!"

French numbers are the same way. If the only system you've ever used is a shitty system, the shitty system is the only logical way of doing things. Human brains are smart, but also dumb. That's actually the point of this article.

I am slowly training myself to intuit SI units, especially at work. It's better, and I know that, but it's fucking hard. I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to be able to replace it for cooking. It's just too deep. Probably the same as a Frenchman who learned to count in French. Learning to cook with standard units was coincident with learning to speak. You simply can't renovate those memories.

They're still bad systems though.

Parent is referring to situations where you pronounce the numbers pairwise with regards to the digits. Like we (or at least I and my friends) in english pronounce screen resolutions: 720p => "seven twenty p", and years: 1984 => "nineteen eighty-four".

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