French Numbers

File this under the French Generally Trying to Confound Foreigners.

Any student learning French is bound to discover that counting is no easy feat in French. One to ten are relatively simple, if somewhat hard to pronounce ("deux" always gets me personally). Eleven to twenty can be hard, but pretty much mirrors English, so I am ok there.

But get up there to 69 and thereafter lies trouble.

70 in French, literally translated, is sixty-ten. Yes, soixante-dix.

71 is sixty-eleven. 72, sixty-twelve. And so on and so on.

But that is not it.

80 then is NOT sixty-twenty. Oh no. That wouldn't make any sense. 80 becomes quartre-vingts, translated four-twenties.

Wait, that is not all! 90, following this bizarre, unnecessarily complicated, lunatic system, is four-twenty-ten (quatre-vingt-dix).

WFT, right?

I've been learning French for over 10 years now and I got myself used to this somewhat. It does still take a while for me to write the numbers when someone is, for example, telling me their phone number - if they say for example, sixty, I start writing a 6, and then they add eleven or twelve or whatever, and I then start to be befuddled and madly cross out the 6 and start installing a 7 - crazy, I tell you!

OK but there is more.

Hanaya is in 3rd grade and earlier this school year was learning to write out numbers in letters. I saw in her notebook that 80 is written "quatre-vingts" in plural, with the "s" at the end, but any number beyond that loses that "s", so 82 becomes "quatre-vingt-deux" and not "quatre-vingts-deux". I told Hana that this is totally wrong, to always make it a plural after 80.

She came home the next day and almost cried saying that she got all her numbers wrong on a quiz because she put all the "s"s after "quatre-vingts". I was stunned at the incompetency of her teacher - how could this be? Lo and behold, when I confronted PeeWee with the indignity of it all, he calmly informed me that, no, in fact after 80 the twenties become singular and there is no "s" at the end of "vingt". Why, I screamed at him. Why? He then went on to inform me that the same goes for 100, apparently. So 200 is "deux-cents" with an "s" at the end of "cent". But make 201 and it becomes singular, "deux-cent-et-un" (I'm not sure if I am doing that correctly, with all the hyphens and the "et" thrown in - but you get the idea). Same goes for 1000.

Wow, I was stunned all over again. It got me wondering if there is such a thing as "No Child Left Behind" in France. How can you possibly make that make sense to a child? And if it does not make sense, do you then just go on to accept it? What kind of non-assertive, rote-driven, conforming children are we raising here? Quite a big issue, wouldn't you say? Apparently the Belgians and the Canadians and the Swiss all did sort of rebel and they have separate words for 70, 80, 90 - good for them. Of course, the French turn up their noses at their inferior grasp of the French language, but I much prefer the straightforward way of counting myself.

There you have it. The convoluted system of French numbers. All I can do is sigh... and hope that I write the numbers correctly whenever I write out a check.


PS After the above episode, Hana is reluctant to do her homework with me. If I appear not to really know the answer, she then instructs me to "google it, maman". She's now discovered, at the tender age of 8, that I can be wrong, very wrong, and that she knows more than me in some (many?) areas. Sigh...