"Andrew" wrote in message
...
On 13:50 14 May 2021, NY said:
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.

germans quote number pairs backwards, "five and twenty (blackbirds)"
while we would say twenty-five.

That's what I was referring to above.