Peter Able wrote:
On 14/05/2021 14:03, Pamela wrote:
On 13:50 14 May 2021, NY said:
"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).

I notice on the continent people often quote the digits of a phone
number in pairs, whereas the UK tends to quote a number in groups of
three digits.

I originally put it down to how their phone company laid out the
digits but I think it's more widespread than that.

Personally, I kind of visualise and alomst recognise the SIGHT of
digit-pairs but I remember digit-triplets mainly by their SOUND.


As already said, it may be structurally easier to work in digit pairs or
triplets - or a mixture.

Surely the only rule is that it is discourteous to confirm back a number
NOT in the format first spoken. E.g. 23 93 73 confirmed back as 239 373 !

I actually do that intentionally both for myself and with others. It's a
good check that a digit hasn't been misplaced or accidentally inverted e.g.
forty two (40 2) vs forty-two (42).