
Show HN: Master Numbers in a Foreign Language - jasonlfunk
https://foreignnumbers.com/
======
alister
For anyone who hasn't studied a foreign language extensively, you might be
surprised to learn that numbers are much more difficult than your intuition
would suggest.

You might think, what's the big deal? You need memorize around 40 words (i.e.,
the words for 0-9, 10-19, 20, 30, ..., 90, 100, 1000, million, etc.), plus a
few rules, and then practice until you're fast.

I want to point out some difficulties that people learning English encounter.
Every foreign language will have its own anomalies.

\- In English, a year like 1776 is spoken as 17-76, not as one thousand seven
hundred seventy six. And if you say it the long way, a native English speaker
might even get a little thrown off.

\- As an exception to the above, a year like 2001, is spoken as two thousand
and one, not as 20-01.

\- As an exception to the exception above, a year like 1701 is spoken as
17-oh-1, and not the long way.

\- Times like 3:45 are spoken in numerous ways, like 3-45, quarter to 4, 15-45
if afternoon, or possibly even 15 to 4.

\- When giving an address, 386 Maple is said as 3-86 Maple, not as 3-8-6 nor
the long the way.

\- You need to learn fractions and ordinal numbers: half, one-third, an-
eighth, etc. You eat a third of a cake on the third floor, but half a cake on
the second floor; i.e., different words in the case of number 2 (half vs
second).

\- When speaking a series of digits, 0 can be said as oh or zero; in many
contexts, oh is much more common.

\- Other exceptions and special cases with dates, prices, decimal points,
measurements, ...

~~~
ramkarthikk
This is great. Since we speak the language every day (even though I'm not a
native speaker), we do not see the minute details of it.

I could think of one more. 308 - Lot of people pronounce it as 3-naught-8.

When we see a score, 1-0, we say 1 - NIL.

0 is complicated.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_number_0_in_Engl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_number_0_in_English)

~~~
schoen
Those examples also show regional variation: in most forms of U.S. English
"naught" and "nil" are almost unheard of today and those examples would be
"3-oh-8" and "1-zero" (or "1-nothing" or "1-oh", or maybe some other variants
that would probably be marked as humorous or satirical like "zip" or "zilch").

~~~
ramkarthikk
True but when we talk about nuances in English numbers, we do have to consider
the other common ways. For someone who is learning English numbers and
watches, say football (soccer), they would often hear 1-nil in commentary. If
they are restricting themselves to just U.S. English numbers, they would be
left confused in this example.

~~~
schoen
Yep, I meant that such regional variations mean that we have even more to
learn about English numbers and make them even trickier!

------
jasonlfunk
Author here. I'm working on launching a new webapp dedicated to helping
language learners master numbers both in production and listening
comprehension. I'd love any feedback, tips, or suggestions from the HN
community.

~~~
jliechti1
This looks like it will be quite useful for anyone practicing languages that
have their own word for 10,000 (Chinese, Japanese, etc), thanks!

In Chinese, the number "100,000" is not read as "100 thousand", rather it is
"10 ten-thousands". This makes translating numbers in the range of
100,000-10,000,000 a bit awkward if you are not used to it.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Norwegian has a similar thing, mostly used by older folks.

"72" might be "seventy-two" but it is also "two plus seventy."

------
orless
I love German language, but one thing totally freaks me out is that in German
numbers between 21 and 99 are pronounced "backwards". That is, 21 is
"einundzwanzig" \- "one and twenty". I speak German for somewhat 15 years
already, but every time I have to deal with numbers below 100, I freeze for a
couple of seconds.

~~~
innocentoldguy
Counting in Japanese is easy to learn, because it is very consistent. For
example, in English, we have "eleven," but in Japanese, it is "juuichi," or
"ten one." "Twenty" is "nijuuichi," or "two ten one."

The thing that always throws me off is that the breaks in larger numbers are
different than in English. For example, as we add more and more zeros to a
number, we say:

One, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one million,
ten million, one hundred million, one billion.

In Japanese, they break the numbers up like this (they use different words, of
course):

One (1), ten (10), hundred (100), thousand (1,000), one "man" (10,000), ten
"man" (100,000), one hundred "man" (1,000,000), one thousand "man"
(10,000,000), one "oku," (100,000,000), and ten "oku" (1,000,000,000).

I'm pretty good up until one "man," then I have to start thinking.

~~~
pacaro
But Japanese has the extra wrinkle that it uses different words depending on
what is being counted...

~~~
scaramanga
That seemed insane to me at first but somehow that is easily intuitively
absorbed.

The man (10,000) thing catches me out every time though.

~~~
Nadya
Depending on how obscure the counter is - even Japanese people struggle [0]!
Honestly, you only need a dozen or two counters. The hard part for me is
remembering to use them.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6sNa70KsW8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6sNa70KsW8)

------
S4M
One trick that helped me to master the numbers in a foreign languages was to
mentally make additions in that language. For example, in Japanese, I would
ask myself "How much is _Ni_ plus _Go_?"

At first I would mentally do "well, _Ni_ is 2, _Go_ is 5, 2+5=7, 7 is _Nana_ ,
so that's the answer" and at some point I was able to do it directly without
translating the numbers to my native language.

~~~
sdrothrock
The most difficult problem I have with Japanese numbers (going on 13 years of
study and ten years in-country) is STILL dealing with counting higher numbers
based on 10,000s. I've drilled and practiced and it still doesn't come
fluently; I always find myself converting the Japanese to English, doing the
math, then reconverting to Japanese, usually using my fingers to tick off
zeroes to figure out how many 10,000s the number has.

~~~
wapz
The times I count higher than 1,000 in Japanese is almost always currency. I
think in USD and yen, so if I say 一万円 I think either "ichimanen" or $100. When
I have to translate a big number like 54万円 I just tell them $5400. It's surely
not as good as properly learning but it just takes so much longer when
translating live.

------
shdon
Mine only shows "American" on Firefox, plenty of other languages on Chrome,
both on Windows 10. Why the discrepancy?

~~~
jasonlfunk
I'm not sure exactly. It is currently using the browser's speech synthesis
functionality. I think Chrome has some languages shipped with it while Firefox
may rely solely on the OS. I will probably need to switch away from the
browser to get a consistent experience.

~~~
matt_morgan
FF on Fedora 25 showed lots of languages, FYI.

------
throwaway2016a
This is very cool. And it has Korean. When I tried to do Korean in Rosetta
Stone, numbers are where I dropped off. With that said, it would be nice if
there were a learning mode for people who don't know the numbers to learn them
through this.

~~~
sevensor
Korean has two sets of numbers! (Il, e, sam... and hana, dul, set, ... ). When
I worked for a Korean company, I heard the first more than the second, but I
could never work out what the right context was for each set of numbers. I
could usually pick out the numbers up to 20 or so, which was all I really
needed in a work context.

------
madflame991
Not all languages in the "Lots of Supported Languages" are actually supported;
i.e. Greek, Turkish, Swedish...

~~~
Broken_Hippo
This!

I was pretty excited to see a Norwegian flag on there, as not only do I
sometimes not understand numbers, but there are a few different ways to say
larger numbers. Click on the link and it is unavailable. I was sorely
disappointed.

~~~
jasonlfunk
Hm, I'll look into it. Right now it is using the built-in SpeechSynthesis
library in the browser. You may try installing the language in the
accessibility settings for your OS. (Could you try this and let me know?)

I've considered adding a fallback API like Google's Cloud API if the browser
is unavailable, but I haven't done that yet.

If you didn't, be sure to get on the feedback/email list and I'll let you know
when I do.

------
toomanybeersies
It was interesting when I was in Vietnam recently, a lot of Vietnamese people
I dealt with outside the cities didn't speak any English at all, except for
numbers, or at least pretended as much.

It seems a bit backwards really. It's easy to write down numbers (which they
often did, or they showed me the cash I had to pay). Conveniently the
motorbike mechanics are usually so good you just point at what's wrong and
they'll figure it out pretty quickly.

------
lawn
Hmm everything I try is unavailable. Tried on firefox and chromium. Is the
site overloaded or is it something on my end?

~~~
jasonlfunk
It's probably on your end as the voice is done in the browser. Which OS are
you on? The browsers may require some OS functionality for the speech
synthesis to work.

~~~
lawn
Slackware, firefox 51.0.1.

~~~
kalleboo
For Firefox on Linux you need to install a speech synthesis engine such as
espeak

------
uses
Sometimes when I click Replay, it autofails me and moves to the next question.

------
whelchel
This is great! Bookmarked. Numbers are rattled off so quickly in foreign
languages, and small syntax differences where the order is changed and really
cause new learners to pause and miss the complete rest of the sentence etc.

------
stoolpigeon
Just ran through Hungarian for a bit - lots of fun. Hungarian is easy as the
numbering system is super consistent and logical. Though this just covers the
cardinal numbers. The other types in Hungarian are quite different.

~~~
jasonlfunk
Really? Like what, for instance? I know that ordinal numbers are typically
different in languages. Are there others?

~~~
tetromino_
Don't know about Hungarian, but in Russian I can think of at least four types
of numerals:

\- cardinal (what is the number?); for example, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat' (два,
три, четыре, пять)

\- ordinal (which position in a sequence?); for example, vtoroy, trety,
chetvyorty, pyaty (второй, третий, четвёртый, пятый)

\- collective (how many?); for example, dvoye, troye, chetvero, pyatero (двое,
трое, четверо, пятеро)

\- nominative (what is the number's name?); for example, dvoika, troika,
chetvyorka, pyatyorka (двойка, тройка, четвёрка, пятёрка)

~~~
schoen
In Latin there are cardinals, ordinals, and also distributives,
frequentatives, and according to some people multiplicatives (tres, tertius,
terni, ter, triplex). Their meanings are something like:

three, third, three apiece, thrice, triple

These answer questions like: How many apples were there? Which one of the
apples did you want? How were the apples distributed to the children? How many
times did you count the apples? How has the apple population grown since last
year?

At least for small numbers, English seems to have a distinctive form for each
of these except for the distributive. But Latin will have many of these
distinctive forms even for large numbers, like sescenties 'six hundred times'
and octingentesimus 'eight hundredth'.

Edit: there's also some specialized vocabulary for fractions such as quadrans,
sextans, octans, and even specific fractions like dodrans (3/4) and quincunx
(5/12). But I'm not sure that these patterns are productive (generalizable)
for larger denominators. Per Wikipedia, it looks like they're not, but quite a
few have specific names:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions)

(I'd never heard of most of those! ... now I remember learning about the
distributives for the first time at a spoken Latin event and remarking that
numbers sounded surprisingly complicated in Latin, to which the organizer
replied "dimidiam partem nescis!" 'you don't know the half of it!'.)

------
officemonkey
One day, during a multi-hour car-ride, I drilled my wife on French numbers by
reading off the license plates we saw. She would translate two and three
digits.

Her instructor said she had never seen someone improve so fast.

------
pawelwentpawel
Nice one, bookmarked :) I'm trying it out now and one thing is a bit annoying
- the track for the number is played immediately as I press the "guess" button
for the previous one.

~~~
jasonlfunk
Yeah, it does. Do you think a short delay might be help?

------
magic_beans
This is amazing! Adding a "years" category would be great too!

~~~
jasonlfunk
Thanks! Great idea.

------
floatas
I entered 890 when correct answer was 89. 89 is all shown in green at the end
and its hard to know which ones I got wrong. Other than that, really fun to
play.

------
polemic
Btw, misspelt "Finnish" as "Finish" in multiple locations.

------
imranq
This is great! But I couldn't find any way to learn visually?

~~~
jasonlfunk
Yep, I plan to add this functionality soon.

------
bbcbasic
All languages show as unavailable. Android 5.1.0 chrome 56

------
wingerlang
Cool, will be using it for Thai now. So far so good.

------
martalist
Your Australian voice is decidedly British.

~~~
Symbiote
The Australian voice is definitely Australian, and the British, British, for
me.

I'm British. Are you British or Australian? I've found Americans often confuse
us.

~~~
schoen
It's using browser speech synthesis rather than a recording, so the voice
could be different from browser to browser and OS to OS!

------
3pt14159
Wow, this is actually really good. Thank you! This will help immensely for my
Russian.

Any plans for ads or monetization, or are you just going to keep it as a free
thing?

