Please can someone help me with this one.
I can understand basic Chinese numbers pretty easily; 十、百、千、萬 etc however I am really confused by numbers such as these
1,345萬
1,2萬
1034萬
Please can someone convert these numbers so that I can see all of the zeros? This should make it easier for me to understand.
Thanks
Just add four zeros and drop the 萬 on each number.
“Wan” means 10,000, as you know. So just write down how many 10,000s you have (by adding 4 zeroes, as has been suggested).
Interpreters, who deal with big numbers all the time, get to be quite automatic in going back and forth. The easiest way to do that is to pick one unit (in a particular direction, like English>Chinese or Chinese>English) at a time, and just practice with it. Start with “bai Wan”, so that any time you hear that, you automatically say “million”. “Yi” is not too hard either, being “hundred million”, then “shI Yi” is “billion”. The ones that were hardest for me to get were “QIAN Wan” for the ten-million mark (the easiest reference for that is “liang QIAN SAN bai Wan taIWAN reNmiN” for “the 23 million people of Taiwan” 
comes up a lot in speeches) and bai Yi for ten billion.
I practiced with license plates…just pick one out, put a random unit at the end of the digits, and say the number. You may not want to get quite that obsessive.
You just have to get your head around the fact that English uses groups of three zeroes (units, tens, hundreds) for each larger number, whereas Chinese uses groups of four zeroes (units, tens, hundreds, thousands) for each larger number. It’s an interesting difference. I wonder what the historic reasons were for choosing three or four zeroes, and what the relative advantages or disadvantages (if any) one system has over the other.
Is it somehow linked to the word myriad? I seem to remember something along those lines.
Well, myriad means 10,000. It’s Greek, so I don’t think there’s any “connection” other than having the same meaning as “wan”.
At least we don’t have to deal with lakhs and crores like they do in India.
81 position abacus and prime number equal temperament to calculate…boom, my head just exploded.
At least Chinese only has one set of numbers, as opposed to Japanese (and Korean?).
Not exactly true. They have another set of written numbers they use for financial transactions in order to prevent fraud because the normal numbers can be changed to other normal numbers very easily. In my local bank, they actually have charts with these at the counters, presumably because people don’t know them. Then, there are also regional variations on numbers, and also some esoteric sets of numbers such as Buddhist numbers (which I know nothing about).
[wikipedia]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numbers[/wikipedia]
I’m aware of the bank numbers and the regional numbers, but they are mostly irrelevant to everyday life - even ones like 廿 are typically read out as er4shi2 rather than nian4, at least in Taiwan. Nobody has to learn this. What I mean is that they are not of the scale of numbers in Japanese, where there are parallel sets of “Chinese” and “Japanese” pronunciations for the numbers that are used based on context. Even someone who is illiterate has to be aware of this.
odyssey: Yes, I know about those. I have done Japanese martial arts for more than half of my life and all the counting is done in Japanese, so the shi/yon and shichi/nana distinctions are things I am aware of. That there are (at least) two pronunciations is a general issue though, not restricted just to numbers. For example, sword can be ken or to.
[quote=“Chris”]Well, myriad means 10,000. It’s Greek, so I don’t think there’s any “connection” other than having the same meaning as “wan”.
At least we don’t have to deal with lakhs and crores like they do in India.[/quote]
I was thinking more along the lines of the evolution of languages. Sanskrit has a word they used for 10,000, so does Greek, Latin onwards doesn’t in the same way. Some languages evolve more than others kind of thing. However, I’ve thought about it more overnight and realised that it’s probably bollocks.
[quote=“odysseyandoracle”]I’m aware of the bank numbers and the regional numbers, but they are mostly irrelevant to everyday life - even ones like 廿 are typically read out as er4shi2 rather than nian4, at least in Taiwan. Nobody has to learn this. What I mean is that they are not of the scale of numbers in Japanese, where there are parallel sets of “Chinese” and “Japanese” pronunciations for the numbers that are used based on context. Even someone who is illiterate has to be aware of this.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numbers[/quote]
Taiwanese is something like that too. Phone numbers is one place the “Chinese” numbers are used.
This tool may be worth a try since the OP is still learning.
toshuo.com/chinese-tools/chinese-number-tool/