A Word a Day — ‘Ten Thousand’
Posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Post Content
After two days of simple characters, it’s time to get down to work again, with this 13 stroke monster! Although it looks intimidating, don’t worry - you’ll see it’s actually written in quite a logical fashion. Remember, the general rule for Mandarin Characters is “top to bottom, left to right”.
As I alluded to in my post on the character for ‘hundred’ two days ago, Chinese has special characters for various powers of ten. We’ve seen ten, hundred and thousand, and now it’s time for the big brother: ten thousand. While English combines two separate words to represent the number 10000, Mandarin Chinese uses a single special character pronounced ‘oo-an’, which sounds almost identical to the English word ‘won’. Instead of saying “That scooter is thirty thousand dollars”, Mandarin speakers will say “That scooter is three ten thousand dollars”. This can be quite confusing for foreigners, constantly requiring mental arithmetic to translate the ‘ten thousands’ into ‘thousands’. If in doubt, write it out - you wouldn’t want to sign a rental agreement for 50000 dollars a month when you only intended to pay 5000!
del.icio.us 
You can use anything created by me on this site in terms of the 
One Comment
On Thu 20th Mar 08 @ 5:25 pm Grace said:
Cool! So you’re actually updating your blog! Have you learned some new Chinese words lately?