Not part of the normal counting scale in English or Chinese Part of the "normal counting scale" in English but not Chinese Not part of the "normal counting scale" in English or Chinese Part of the "normal counting scale" in Chinese, see below, not in English by the way, did you know that the word "myriad" in English literally means "ten thousand"! Part of the "normal counting scale" both in English and Chinese, see below Now let’s just learn the words for bigger units and we can make the numbers easily by adding the appropriate numbers Number English numberĪgain, note how the pinyin for these characters is written without spaces Twenty is also very easy, just say “Two Ten”, twenty one is then “Two Ten One” and so on. Note that these numbers are rolled into one without a space not Shi Yi, but Shiyi1Ĭhinese numbers from twenty to ninety-nine For example “15” is just written as “Ten Five”, 18 is written as “Ten Eight”. Once you get to ten, just put ten in front of any other number to make numbers from 11 to 19. "Shi" (rhymes with her but with a soft "r") "Geee-ooo" (Like "gee-wizz, ooo-ah Cantona) "Ser" (rhymes with her, but with a very soft "r" sound) List of Chinese numbers from zero to ten English number In some dialects “两个” (“two of”) can be merged into “俩” (lia3) which then does not require “个”. Some exceptions When the number two (二) means “two of something”, the character changes to “两” (liang3 – “two of”). Chinese Supreme Court Ruling showing the use of English numbers Screen shot from official website of Chinese Supreme Court showing dates (in the red text on the left side) including the character for zero. The English 0 is derived from an Indian version of 〇. As an aside I used to believe that the 〇 character was derived from the English 0 but actually it’s the other way round. There is one character per number, except for the number for “0” which is commonly written in two ways: The character for zero is often just written with a big circle character 〇 as well as with the formal character 零. Part 1 – Easy Chinese Numbers Chinese numbers from zero to tenĬhinese numbers from 1-10 couldn’t be much easier. See my article on Word Counts for more information about that. If that happens, be warned that they won’t be included in Asian word counts done with most software. In Chinese texts, there’s nothing to stop writers using our familiar English numbers (I’m aware they are actually Arabic, but I think the term “English numbers” is clearer). However for translators, there are some nasty surprises in formal documents like bank statements or contracts which are not covered in any academic textbooks. In this guide, I will start by giving beginners a useful guide to Chinese numbers, then I’ll provide some references for translators.Ĭhinese numbers are very easy for the most part, if you learn from 1 to 10, you can then calculate numbers right up to 99, then if you add the word 100 you can get up to 999, and so on.
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