Sunday, May 17, 2009

Need to learn to count in Hindi

I really need to learn the Hindi numbers fast. Pune was OK because you could manage with English number a lot. But here, you need to pretty much be able to deal with Hindi for the numbers. The thing is, with Tamil numbers, they are similar to Telugu numbers in terms of how the words are formed, both of which are similar to English numbers as well. For eg: 42 is forty-two, you say the word for "forty" then the word for "two" and just put them together with some "glue" sound. But in Hindi, you say the numbers as "two and forty". And that's just the beginning. The words for 29, 39 etc are "one less than thirty" and "one less than forty" etc.

BTW, all this is new to me. I only learned this much after some extensive googling. When someone says a number I have to translate that in my head like a code and then when I need to say a number back I need to form the code in my head and spit it out. You can imagine how frustrating it is when I need to bargain with someone! Usually I pretend I didn't hear the number the first time, or pretend to be examining the fruit or thinking about something when I have to bargain. I swear, on atleast one occasion when the vendor asked for a certain price (I think Rs. 20) I tried to bargain by offering him a greater amount (Rs. 40). Luckily he thought I was being rude and just walked away instead of taking me for a ride.

1 comment:

aa said...

oh man, ive spent the last 20 minutes laughing at some of ure funnier posts, and reading them out to R. keep blogging mr :)