Lesson Nine: Fun With Numbers (Part Four)

You have all have been doing great sticking with it throughout the numbers section.

Already your brains are being wired to speak and read Chinese characters without even knowing it. Every time you read over these character you will become more familiar with them even if you choose to not learn the writing.

十 (Shi2)

百 (Bai3)

千 (Qian1)

十 (is number 10) 百 (is marker for hundred) 千 (is marker for thousand).

When we talk about hundred markers or thousand markers, it is actually the same thing that English has as well. Here is a example of what I mean.

一百二十一。

That example sentence above means (121) you can see what I mean by markers as 百 by itself is not one hundred you need to put the number 1 or 一 in front to indicate it's value. Also if you check you will see that 十 can also work as a marker and a standalone number. So as a breakdown of how it works it just means that if you put a number before 百 you are telling everyone that the real value of 百 is the number in front, and this works the same for 十 also.

The easiest way to remember this is to just break all your numbers down to 三百 (300), 五十 (50), and finally the single digit number 六 (6). So in the end you have 356, see it is not as difficult if you just do it this way.

So good job everyone keep up the hard word it will payoff in the end.

See you next time on Zhongwen Study.