"Theo" wrote in message
...
In uk.telecom.mobile Pamela wrote:
A web site sends you 6-digit number to your phone to check your ID. Do
you memorise this by saying to yourself: 12-34-56 or 123-456?

It's a genuine question to see what number span people are using to
remember random numbers.

It depends on the structure of the number. eg:

55-67-99
132-231
1000-44
9-88888
27-288-9

Yes, if the number is already separated by hyphens/spaces, those are the
chunks that I try to memorise.

Apparently when the GPO started issuing phone numbers that were longer than
a couple of digits, they did some research and found that people could
remember chunks of either 2 or 3 digits, but a 4-digit chunk was harder to
remember.

I'm not sure why the UK read a chunk as a stream of digits (one-two-seven
[pause] three-four-one) whereas European countries assign tens-and-units
significance to pairs of digits (twelve [pause] seventy-three [pause]
forty-one).

German has the problem of its "four and twenty blackbirds" reversal of tens
and units - you hear drei-und-siebzig (three and seventy) but you write down
73 in the opposite order.

Most Germans have a mental buffer, waiting until they hear both numbers in
the pair before writing down the digits. But I noticed one German writing
down the digits in the order that he heard them: first the units, then the
tens digit to the left of it; skip three spaces forwards for next unit and
back one for tens. This three-steps-forwards, one-step-back thing seemed to
be very cumbersome.


French falls foul of ambiguity because of its quatre-vignts notation for 80:
quatre vignts dix could be any of:

quatre-vignts-dix-huit (98)
quatre-vignts dix-huit (80 18)

A pause makes all the difference. I imagine that French speakers make a very
exaggerated pause in the second case to avoid ambiguity, whereas almost no
pause is needed between non-ambiguous pairs such as vignt-huit trente-quatre
(28 34).