Guest Author - Caroline Baker

Counting in Chinese is as easy as 1, 2, 3. Or Yi, Er, San!

Once you learn the basic numbers from one to ten, you can literally count up to almost one hundred. Part of the reason counting is made so easy has to do with the use of the abacus in the Chinese Culture.

The abacus is made up of two portions. You start from the left and work your way to the right. The lower part is for counting single entities. When you reach the five along the bottom, you clear the bottom and click a single bead at the top of that column. As you hit 10, you have two beads down at the top part, thus you should clear that row and click one bead up from the bottom of the second row. You continue to count, following this zigzag pattern until you're done progressing.

Sound complicated? It's actually quite a bit easier once you get use to using this process.

But the importance of this is the signifigance of this single bead entity in how the Chinese developed their numbering system. Before we get into this detail, though, let's go over the basics. Here are the numbers in order from one to ten:

	yi (like saying "e") -- one
	er (as in "how are you") -- two
	san (San Marino) -- three
	si (as in "do-si-do") -- four
	wu (like "would" without the ld) -- five
	liu (as in "in lieu of") -- six
	chi (like the first part of "cheese" without the se) -- seven
	ba (like the sound sheep make, "ba") -- eight
	jiu (a bit like saying "geo") -- nine
	shi (like telling someone "Shh, quiet please.") -- ten

Now that you've got the one to ten, counting up to 99 in Chinese is a breeze. It's far easier than most latin-based languaged and modelled after the idea of the beads in the abacus.

So, let us work on the teens. If you want to say 11. You essentially have one bead in the tens and one in the ones. So this translates to: shi yi
Twelve is: shi er
Thirteen is: shi san
Easy?

When you get to 20, you have two beads in the tens. So to say twenty you say: er shi
Twenty-one is: er shi yi
Twenty-two is: er shi er
And so on...

You can keep on doing this until you hi 99, which is jiu shi jiu.

When you hit 100, you can't say shi shi. Sounds quite funny. So there's another character for 100.

bai (sounds a bit like "to buy") -- hundred

The symbol for 100 is the image of a sun rising (or clarity) topped by the one. So in some way, 100 is a clearing [of the tens] in which the counting them starts all over again.

So 101 is bai yi.
One hundred and twenty-one is bai er shi yi.

This can take you up to 999 until you get a new number character for one thousand!