Well, I DO know how the French count and compared to English it IS highly confusing. You can hardly convince me that saying "Four times twenty and ten" is as straight forward as saying "Nine tens".
And just to be clear: I'm not some Yankee or Brit with a superiority complex, no, I am German, and we have our own shitty version of this: Instead of moving along the digits from highest to lowest, as in "Four hundreds and two tens and nine", we do "Four hundred and nine and two tens".
It indeed is.