When I went to China about 5 years ago, all the numbers were Arabic numbers. Not sure if this is a regional thing, or if this is a more recent development.

[–] 42yeah@lemm.ee 27 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

The Chinese numbers are already in use ages ago and (as far as I know) predates the Ming dynasty. Fun fact, there are both “upper case” Chinese numbers (壹，貳，叁，⋯) and “lower case” numbers (一，二，三，⋯). The uppercase numbers are still used in official documents, esp. monetary ones such as checks to indicate the monetary value. For example: “壹拾贰万叁仟肆佰伍拾陆元整” means “¥123,456”. According to Wikipedia, this is done to prevent the numbers from being doctored, like changing 1 to 7.

It’s true that the lower case numbers aren’t used as much, but they are still used in text when the number is less than ten, e.g. “I have three children” -> “我有三个孩子” as opposed to “我有 3 个孩子”, for better paragraph consistency, typesetting and whatnot. However the Chinese numbers will become too long for anything greater than a hundred, so it’s all Arabic numbers after that.

Source: am Chinese

[–] Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

That's super interesting! I barely know any Chinese and probably just assumed the characters were for language instead of numbers.
The public transit system used arabic numbers (maybe as well as the Chinese characters?), so at least that was easy to navigate lol

[–] MisterD@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 months ago

Wow! Uppercase numbers. Fascinating.

[–] MonkderDritte@feddit.de 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

So the uppercase numbers include phonetic? They look each so different.

[–] 42yeah@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago

Do you mean their prononciations? They’re the same cuz in reality, they represent the same number - like “A” and “a”.

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