5.6 Numbers, time, money — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say and hear a two-digit number, which German reads units first and English reads tens first. Tell the time on the twenty-four hour clock, which is what a German timetable, ticket and news bulletin use. Use the German way of naming the half hour and the quarter hour, which points at the hour that is coming, not the one that has gone. Ask what something costs, pay for it, and tell a bill from a price and a coin from a note. Prerequisites : 5.5 — you need nothing grammatical from it, but this is the last vocabulary lesson of this phase and it assumes the shopping vocabulary from the previous two. Numbers look like the easy lesson and they are not. Half the numerals are free — the German for two, three, six, seven, eight, nine and ten are all recognisable, and so are hundred and thousand. But the way they are assembled is not English, the way the clock is read is not English, and one particular clock expression means something an hour away from what an English speaker will assume. Those three things are worth more attention than the whole word list, so this lesson puts them first. The wall every English speaker hits German says the units of a two-digit number before the tens, joined by the word for and . Twenty-one is einundzwanzig , which is one-and-twenty ; thirty-one is one-and-thirty ; ninety-nine is nine-and-ninety . English did this too, for centuries, and the fossil is still in the nursery rhyme about four-and-twenty blackbirds. Then English switched and German did not. The consequence is not that the words are hard to learn. It is that you cannot write down a number as you hear it. When a German speaker gives you a telephone number, a price or a house number, the first digit out of their mouth is the second digit of the number, and your pen goes to the wrong box. There is no trick for this. The only cure is hearing several hundred of them, which is why the practice section at the end of this lesson asks you to say numbers aloud rather than to translate them. Above a hundred the order becomes mixed, and it is worth seeing why. The hundreds and thousands come first, in the English order, and then the last two digits flip. So a four-digit year is read as a pair of two-digit groups, and the flip with und happens only inside the second group: the first group is a plain teen or hundred word. It is consistent; it is simply not what your ear expects. The clock, and the hour that is coming Two habits to fix here. The first is easy: German uses the twenty-four hour clock for anything written down and for official times — timetables, tickets, opening hours, the news — so an afternoon time there is a number above twelve. In everyday conversation the twelve-hour style with the half and the quarter hour is more usual, and lessons 6.6 and 6.7 come back to it. Sentences 6 and 7 in the list below are the twenty-four hour shape. The second is the one that causes real mistakes. German names the half hour by looking forward to the hour that is coming. The expression built on the word for half plus the numeral three does not mean half past three; it means half past two, because it means half of the way to three. An English speaker who hears it as three thirty is a full hour late. The trap is nastier than it looks, because British English has a colloquial expression that looks identical and means the other thing. When an English speaker says half three they mean three thirty. When a German speaker says the corresponding words they mean two thirty. Sentences 8 and 9 in the list below are both from the corpus, and putting them side by side is the fastest way to see it: in the first, the German numeral is three and the English is two; in the second, the German numeral is four and the English is three. The German numeral is always one ahead. The quarter hour works the same way in the forward-looking style, and German has two competing constructions for it. One says a quarter of the way to twelve and means eleven fifteen. The other says a quarter after eight and means what an English speaker expects. Both are in the corpus, both are in the list below as sentences 10 and 11, and which one you hear depends on the region: the forward-looking quarter is heard in parts of the east and south (lesson 6.7 names them), the English-looking one everywhere. The forward-looking half hour, by contrast, is everywhere. Learn it properly and you will not miss a train. The ones you already have Read this table once and leave it. None of these is in the list below. German English — what changed zwei two — the same word; English lost the w sound but kept the letter drei three — the same word, with the consonant shifted sechs six — the same word, with the German cluster at the end sieben seven — the same word, with the German consonant acht eight — the same word; German still says the sound English only spells neun nine — the same word, with the German diphthong zehn ten — the same word; the first letter is the sound from lesson 0.1 der Tag day — the same word, with the consonant shifted der Euro euro — identical, and the plural after a numeral has no ending der Cent cent — identical in spelling; you will hear it both as [sɛnt], as in English, and as [tsɛnt], with the initial sound of lesson 0.1 Two of those rows carry a warning. The word for the day is free, but the word that looks like the English morning means tomorrow when it is written with a small letter and the morning when it is written with a capital. And the numeral names for sixty and seventy are shortened in a way the pattern does not predict: sixty drops the final s sound of six, and seventy drops the -en of seven, and with it a syllable. Both irregular forms are in the list below. Word list Fifty words in four groups: the numerals that are not free, the counting words, the clock and the calendar, and money. Every noun carries its article. Numerals Word Meaning Notes null de zero, nil — one word where English has zero, nought, nil and love