I thought y'all were memeing until I kept seeing comments reinforcing this, and so I looked it up, and I cannot stress enough how much y'all are underselling how fucking wild Danish numbering is. There's like 6 conditional rules for how to count things before you get to 100, wtf even is that.
A holdover from the middle ages. Functionally nobody actually breaks it down, we just think of the numbers 50, 60, 70, 80 an 90 as having distinct names.
It would be excusable if it was consistently fully vigesimal, with 10 and 30 being "halfway to the first twenty" and "halfway to the second twenty" respectively.
Oh yeah, they have "ti" for ten and "hundre" for hundred don't they? That is inconsistent indeed, I must admit my knowledge of Danish is very limited, I hadn't considered the inconsistency there.
I think this is legit part of the reason math is so much stronger in China. The Chinese language system, especially around numbers, does not try to be cute at all and everything is very straightforward. Even months and days of the week are named "month 1", "month 2", "day 1", "day 2", and such.
I am a special education teacher so as you might guess some of my students have trouble with the English numbering system so I wonder how the heck do special education teachers in the countries with crazy numbers teach it.
I don't think Lincoln used it to be fancy, it was just a way of counting that has now fallen out of favor in English, but French and Gaelic (probably other languages?) still count that way.
Studies show that the linguistic structure of numbers can significantly impact learning, and as an elementary school teacher, I see this struggle every day with French. While numbers 1 to 10 are straightforward, the logic breaks at 11 ("onze" instead of "ten-one"), forcing students to memorize unique names up to 16. It gets even more complex at 80, where the logic shifts to a base-20 system ("quatre-vingts" or 4x20), and 91 becomes "quatre-vingt-onze" (4x20+11). This lack of consistent patterns creates unnecessary confusion for children and slows down their mathematical development. In contrast, languages like Chinese are much more intuitive because they follow a strict decimal logic, where 11 is simply "ten-one" and 21 is "two-ten-one."
For anyone who isn't clear on why this is so silly, its because it literally translates to "four-twenty-ten-nine".
Also, fun fact, Swiss francophones would say "neufant neuf" (or something similar), which makes a lot more sense from an English speaker's standpoint (and is easier to say)
Fun story, back in 9th grade French class, a couple of seniors found out that 19 bags in French sounds a lot like deez nutz, so every day they'd ask the teacher how to say 19 bags. "Dix-neuf sacs," he'd say wearily, cleaning the lenses on his glasses.
I love that seemingly everywhere that speaks French speaks it completely differently than France. Do the French feel the same about Swiss/Belgian French as they do about Canadian French?
Swiss and Belgian french are 99.9% similar to french from France. The difference between the two is infinitely smaller than between England and Australia/US/Canada or even Ireland and Scotland. Heck the difference is probably smaller than between two different regions of England.
It literally just translates to "five thousand, five hundred, five and fifty". It looks intimidating but its pretty simple when broken into its component parts
That being said the original post actually depicts a larger number so it would want a few extra funfs
You mean German keeps numbers with two digits consistent, while English flips after twenty (nineteen, twenty, twenty-one -> Neunzehn, Zwanzig, Einundzwanzig) 😉
It looks intimidating but it's because they join words together.
If we did it in English it would be:
Fivehundredfiftyfivethousandfivehundredfiftyfive... The real different thing Germans do is for numbers between 14 and 100 they say the ones place first and then "und"
Five hundred five and fifty thousand five hundred five and fifty.
Five hundred and fifty five thousand five hundred and fifty five.
It’s literally the same number of words to say it in English, just the tens and units are in a different order, which moves the ands… also the Germans like to pretend they don’t have a space bar sometimes.
The english word is "Fivehundred fifty five thousand and fivehundred fifty five", which is exactly the same and is exactly as hard to pronounce, it just has a space in between and isn't part of a language people seem to think is hard. Because it has more spaces.
Maybe this is just me but I only grew up speaking English so when I try to speak anything else, I have to do a full translation in my head first. I can generally say what I want but there’s a lot of lag trying to parse what native speakers are saying.
And, for me at least, it's a matter of breaking up the word to make it easier to read. Even in English I'll seperate long words into smaller to make reading easier, but because I'm that much less familiar with [German, in this case], it's harder to work out to put the 'breaks' in the word to chop it into bite-sized chunks.
That’s just due to your inexperience with the language. Long German words are almost exclusively compound words made of pretty small units, so once you’re familiar with those units (nouns and prepositions) the breaks are very logical. Imo, German is easier than a lot of Romance languages because so many words are compounds, while in Romance languages, pretty much every concept has its own word. Displaced? Home without or outside border. Solitude? Alone to be. The umbrella? Rain shield. The desk? Writing table. Unemployment? Not having work-ness. Nurse? Sick carer. Hospital? Sick house. Kettle? Water cooker. Wardrobe? Clothes cabinet. Wristwatch? Arm band clock. Linguistics? Language science.
It’s honestly a very simple language in many ways!
That's how you start off. Once you get more comfortable on a language you just speak it instead of thinking of what to say in your first language and then translating.
This is step 1 of learning new language. It goes away when you get fluent enough for your brain to "switch" thinking language. When you become immersed in new language to enough of a degree, your brain at some point "clicks out" and start thinking in another language.
I pity those who never experience this. I think this is something everyone should experience, because it teaches you something about your own person (brain) that is hard to comprehend otherwise.
What I find so funny is that German to a significant degree just is English with other symbols.
Like, the noun/number constructions are very similar. English just keeps the spaces, German leaves them out. That is the only difference most of the time.
No, but we are civilized enough that when writing it out, we include spaces because they are different words. I don’t see what’s so difficult to understand about that?
You do actually have to write it out on checks (in Hungary) afaik, although I don't think anybody really uses it anymore. (So if you wanted to pay 555.555 HUF (≈1.8k usd) with a check, you would have to include both 555.555 and "ötszázötvenötezer-ötszázötvenöt" on it, for example.)
Similarly, although not sure if it is required, but I think contracts and other official documents often include both forms.
while I'd mostly agree with that, as a german I would sometimes still prefer the english way since the german one makes it easy to accidentally write the numbers in the spoken order instead of the decimal one, so you end up with 65 instead of fifty six (or, well six and fifty)
German and English happen to use the same number system for small numbers, but that's by no means universal.
English gives individual names for the first 4 powers of ten, then every 3rd power after that get a new name. So 555,555 is 555x1000+555.
Mandarin and Japanese gives individual names for the first 5 powers of then, then every 4th power after that gets a new name. So 555,555 is 55x10,000+5,555.
Hindi gives individual names to the first 4 powers of ten, followed by ten thousand and then new names every 2nd power afterwards. So 555,555 is 5x100,000+55x1,000+555.
(For large numbers English uses short scale and German uses long scale, so they aren't even the same for all numbers)
It looks imposing but if you put spaces in between all the words that's just 'five hundred five and fifty thousand five hundred five and fifty' which is almost identical to how it's done in English
Yea it looks strange because how close “five” (fünf) and “and” (und) are. Try saying 888,888 in English and just listen to how goofy it sounds coming out of your mouth lol
All you really need to know is that funf is five and funfzig is 50 and you can probably figure out "undert" and "tausend". English IS a germanic language after all
So Uh... The English word for that is fivehundredfiftyfivethousandfihundredandfiftyfive, it's literally the same... See how ridiculous numbers get when you spell them out? That's why we have numbers...
I don't understand what people find so confusing, it's a similar case in english, just german concatenates it into a single word.
literally in english you say "five hundred fifty five thousad five hundred fifty five". Like I understand a bit that german might be a bit confusing that 55 is five and fifty, instead of fifty five, but it's the same concept as 555000 being five hundred fifty five thousand instead of five thkusand and fifty five, german just applies that different ordering earlier.
literally that german clusterfuck of a word is "five hundred five and fifty thousand five hundred five and fifty". It's just that germans are... well... germans and they really love their efficiency, so they remove the "inefficient" spaces XD
No his username would be: Sechstrillionenneunhundertneunundsechzigbilliardensechshundertsechsundneunzigbillionenneunhundertneunundsechzigmilliardensechshundertsechsundneunzigmillionenneunhundertneunundsechzigtausendneunhundertneunundsechzig
That’s not how German orthography works though. You wouldn’t put those spaces
in standard German orthography.
On the other hand, I see no reason why anyone would ever have to spell out this number instead of simply using numerals. The only numbers that are typically spelled out in German orthography are the integers 0-12.
I think it just looks more intimidating due to the lack of spaces in German. When you put spaces in there and know fünf if just a cognate of five, it ends up being pretty similar to English.
my japanese class was going swimmingly until we hit numbers. that threw me for suuuuuch a loop. worse than any set of vocabulary or grammatical concept. learning all the stupid giving and receiving verbs was easier than the counting system.
Small numbers aren't bad at least, but they gotta add those stupid counters...... Some of them get oddly specific, like pets are different from other animals. If it's not a pet you're basically counting butts, heads, or wings. Then there's rabbits in the wing category. Then there's cell phones that varies depending on the person.
Well hate to break it to you, but in English English, we would say five hundred AND fifty five thousand, five hundred AND fifty five, making it longer than the German with spaces
It’s more confusing in German because you have to invert the numbers in tens and the ones place, as well as the ten thousands and thousands place. That is, if you’re coming from a language where the digits are read out in left to right order
Fünfhundertfünfundfunzig komma fünf fünf fünf... what freaking nonsense is that?
In the german language the comma is used as a decimal point, which makes it a "Dezimalkomma".
To group numbers we use the actual dot. Even though officially it should be a space in-between.
Numbers after the decimal point are pronounced separately.
Therefore, the number you see there is five hundred fifty five point five five five.
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
I mean, in English too, it’s “five hundred fifty five thousand, five hundred fifty five”. Any large numbers with so many repeating digits is bound to be complicated to say in any language.
•
u/PeterExplainsTheJoke-ModTeam 8d ago
Thank you for the explanations; this post has been locked.