Mandarin Chinese - Part 3 - Numbers

Aside Pinyin and Tone, Numbers are easy and are the 1^st to be studied when learning a new language, especially that there are no alphabets in the Chinese language to start with. 
                                                                

Chinese Numbers

The 7 looks like an up-side-down English 7, the 8 looks like an Arabic 8. Also you can spot an English 4 and 5 in the corresponding Chinese 4 and 5. This is how I managed to learn them! 

Chinese numerals are similar to Roman numerals when it comes to expressing tens and hundreds.

• Roman:       37 is XXXVII (3 tens, and a 7)    
• Chinese:  三十七 (3 tens, and a 7 said as sān shí qī)

After learning this logic in numbers I realized that English numbers might be an evolved form of the same root – thirty seven might actually be like ‘three tens and a seven’, where ‘three tens’ evolved to be ‘thirty’ and so).

The hand gestures shown in the picture are used commonly in China to express prices and numbers – so handy to know. 

Saying a decimal number like 4.5 is similar to English. ‘diǎn’ or ‘点’replaces ‘point’.

Hundred is "bai" (百） and thousand is "qian" （千）

1.2    one point two                 一点二          yī diǎn èr

13      ten and three                 十三              shí sān

31   three tens and one            三十一        sān shí yī

800   eight hundreds                八百               jǐ bǎi

So the most complex that sums it all would be:
    

                 1345.8                one thousand three hundred four tens and five point eight    

      一千三百四十五点八     yī     qian      sān      bǎi       sì    shí         wǔ   diǎn   jǐ

This is a basic demonstration of Chinese numbers which helps in understanding and saying numbers. It needs good practice to get used to pronunciation as it is the trickiest part. Actually, when we learned the numbers, we were able to understand what the cashiers are saying by filtering out the numbers we hear. 

The good news is that people in China use English numbers when writing or on tickets. They do not use the Chinese characters. If communicating numbers is not working, you can easily escape the misunderstanding by writing the numbers in English on a piece of paper – everybody understands.