Archive for the ‘Counting’ Category:

There was lots of interest in the calculator to estimate counting time (in English) to one million, one billion and up to one trillion.  I decided to do the same for other popular languages (Spanish).  Here is the calculator that will calculate how long it takes to count to one million (or larger numbers) in Spanish. 
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Updated: Lots of folks on Reddit pointed out some mistakes in the Spanish calculations, and helped me figure out the solutions, so the Spanish graphs are now updated. The Spanish calculator is now live!

Building off of the last post about Counting to One Million in English, I received some comments about looking at other languages.  That seemed like a very good idea, so I looked at a list of the world’s most popular languages and saw Chinese and Spanish listed with English in the Top 3.  Having a little experience with both of those, I set out to compare how long it’d take to count in each of these languages, if you had to pronounce every single number from one to one million.

Again, here’s the plot of the number of syllables per number for English.  The longest word is seven hundred seventy seven thousand seven hundred seventy seven (20 syllables).

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