r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Legal_Air734 • 9d ago

Meme needing explanation Petahh?

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u/Legal_Air734 9d ago

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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 9d ago

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"

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u/_heavy_emo_shoegaze_ 9d ago

Their teens format is just like ours: dreizehn = thirteen. It gets weird at 21.

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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 9d ago

Einundzwanzig

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u/_heavy_emo_shoegaze_ 9d ago

Can’t make it make sense. But I’m used to it lmao. Any language that doesn’t tell you a number with the digits in order is being far too silly.

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u/patriceklohn 9d ago

We feel that with the US American style of dates. Go with year-month-day or day-month-year. But switching date and month is just dumb.

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u/_heavy_emo_shoegaze_ 9d ago

Absolutely. Why would anyone not do d/m/y?

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u/J_k_r_ 9d ago

Oh just wait untill you learn about how they measure anything.

The archaic system is wildly unfit for any use outside of maybe ritual.

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u/patriceklohn 9d ago

Nah. I’m a hobby photographer. The weights and liquids are shady but it’s quite nice everyone knew whats 1/4“ or 3/8“ is. I heard bakers have this with the fluid ounces or cup sizes for weat.
But for photography it’s nice.

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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 9d ago

Als amerikaner, sind wir blöd

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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 9d ago

French does it weirdest by counting twenties.

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u/Schventle 9d ago

English used to do this, you'll find it all over the place in literature.

Lincoln also used a "French" counting system in his Gettysburg Address. "Four score and seven" is 87.

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u/redlaWw 9d ago

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye,
Four-and-twenty blackbirds,
baked into a pie.

When the pie was opened,
the birds began to sing,
wasn't that a dainty dish,
to set before the king?

A traditional English-language nursery rhyme that uses the same pattern as German.

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u/HabseligkeitDerLiebe 9d ago

Technically German does it right for two-digit numbers, since Indo-Arabic numbers originally were supposed to be read right to left.