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Comment by redshirtrob | Hacker News Reader

Sadly no. But that's because we moved from the school district the following summer. It's a bit of a sore point for me.

I have no doubt if I'd stayed there (K-6), I would have been close to fluent. After lunch was a full immersion in French. My teacher was a native speaker from Belgium. I remember having mastered counting in French, which is quite interesting considering most kindergarteners probably have not mastered counting in English.

As for an anecdote, I had one friend who stayed there through 4th grade. He still lists French as a language on LinkedIn.

[Edit] By master counting I mean having mastered the language algorithm, so to speak. Once you can count to 100, it's pretty easy to get to 200, or all the way to 999 with the knowledge at hand. It's not until one thousand that you need a new word. And, IIRC, French has a _very_ mechanical counting mechanism whereby it was even simpler. Perhaps a native speaker can weigh in here?

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You must’ve been learning the Belgian version, because French numbers in France are kind of a mess.

Like English there are special words for some of the “teens” numbers, which is the least of the troubles. Compare deux (two) and douze (twelve) to huit (eight) and dix-huit (ten-eight, or eighteen). Mildly annoying, but we have special cases for “eleven” and “twelve” in English too, no big deal.

Then some of the tens are weird too. While quatre (four) and quarante (forty) are clear, six (six) and soixante (sixty) are a bit tricky, while deux (two) and vingt (twenty) don’t seem to be related. These are then combined in uneven ways, with twenty one being “vingt et un” (twenty and one), while other numbers using the hyphenated form of vingt-cinq (twenty-five). Again, annoying, but manageable.

And then there are the extra special case numbers like seventy, which in France is apparently soixante-dix, or literally “sixty ten”. In some countries this is a much more reasonable “septante”, but not in France. The French actually count their seventies like “soixante-dix-sept”, which translates into “sixty seventeen”, or seventy seven in English.

And then there’s eighty. Holy crap, the number eighty. In French eighty is apparently “quatre-vingts”, or “four twenties”. Whoever came up with that was a brilliant sadist. Requiring some basic multiplication just to count to eighty is downright evil stuff, especially for young kids. Ditto for whoever made ninety “quatre-vingts-dix” (four twenties ten).

Note: I am not a native French speaker; I’m just learning.

The French use the vigesimal system (base-20). I learned this fact while learning Norwegian, which doesn't use a base-20 system anymore, expect almost everybody above 50y still use the Danish system (also base-20, like French), which was indeed very confusing.

In Spanish it's more or less the same as French when it comes to naming numbers, except more predictable spelling and it's base-10: dos (two), doce (twelve), ocho (eight), dieciocho (eighteen), ochenta (eighty), noventa (nighty), cien (one hundred) and so on.

In the case of e.g dos (two) and veinte (twenty), were there doesn't seem to be any relationship, the root of veinte is "dwi" (dos), but it lost a sound somewhere along the way. Two, dos, duo, dual, double, all share the same indo-european root.

Why isn’t 60 in French something like tres-vingt? French is a language full of exceptions which need to be memorised and which are rather random.

Excuse me but I understand vigesimal (base-20) like a potency. The French are not following through on that at all.

If you have a look at Mayan math you will understand how to do "proper" vigesimal.

With proper I mean that what we consider single digit numbers (0-9) which is a range of ten, to be the basis of single digits.

The Mayans actually could represent first twenty (0-19) as one "single digit".

Their idea of numbers was just much more composable than ours is.

I’ll try to give a short explanation:

There are three "words" which make Mayan numbers. A dot, a line and a shell.

The dot represents a one, the bar represents a five, the shell represents a zero.

5 dots make a line (similar to Roman)

One dot above one shell makes twenty. (1 * 20). Like we consider a one and a zero (10) to be greater than 9.

One dot above one shell above one shell makes 400 (1 * 20 * 20)

One dot above one dot above one dot makes 421 ((1 * 20 * 20) + (1 * 20) + (1 * 1))

Compared to the potency of this mathematical language the idea that French are using vigesimal is laughable, because they only denote their 80 like this.

It’s quite fascinating how logical and functional their math was, they were using the potency of zeros long before we Europeans discovered that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F53HuD2lcb8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_numerals

Small nitpick: Kindergarteners are expected to count to 100. At least, that's the case in my county (Wake) in a state not known for K-12 excellence (North Carolina).

Ok, I edited my comment to clarify. I did not mean count to 100 as mastering counting. I meant count _almost_ arbitrarily high.

And small world. My wife hails from Forsyth county.

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