Sunday, February 25, 2007

NORMAL LIFE: What's In A Number?

Still not feeling 100% after my recent bout of Influenza, here I am on a Sunday afternoon attempting to catch up with my Finnish language studies. It's almost unimaginable that, three years into my studies (I've retaken some courses just to be confident to go to the next level), I am still dealing with numbers at Level three (of a potential six).

If I want to indicate that something is in 8,765,432nd place, the written form, in words, would be something like:

kahdeksasmiljoonasseitsemässadaskuudeskymmenesviides-
tuhannesneljässadaskolmaskymmenestoinen

They talk often about what's in a name, but in a Finnish number, there's certainly alot of letters! But it goes to show just how difficult Finnish is if you're still mastering the numbers after three levels of courses.