Numbers

Let's talk about numbers today.

I've always had a problem with grokking large Chinese numerals, because their base is 10 000 instead of the ``usual'' 1 000 that I am used to from the SI prefix world.

There is indeed an SI prefix version of the large Chinese numerals, but I do not see them appearing in the mainstream use of such numbers, often in the form of economic numbers/population numbers as reported in the news. In those cases, there is a tendency to use the more ``traditional'' form.

And so, here is a table of the correlation that I generated from the article so that I can internalise it.

Chinese Unit	Pinyin	Exponential Form	Relationship to SI-prefix
十	shí	101	10=1da
百	bǎi	102	100=1h
千	qiān	103	1k
万	wàn	104	10k
百万	bǎiwàn	106	1M=100×10k
千万	qiānwàn	107	10M=1000×10k
亿	yì	108	100M
十亿	shíyì	109	1G=10×100M
兆	zhào	1012	1T
千兆	qiānzhào	1015	1P=1000×1T
京	jīng	1016	10P
百京	bǎijīng	1018	1E=100×10P
垓	gāi	1020	100E
千垓	qiān'gāi	1021	1Z=10×100E
秭	zǐ	1024	1Y
穰	ráng	1028	---
沟	gōu	1032	---
涧	jiàn	1036	---
正	zhèng	1040	---
载	zǎi	1044	---

That's all the content for this entry.

Till the next update.