[codychan]

I'm Chinese. The most confusing thing for me between English and Chinese is the number. English number is seperated by comma every 3 digits (thousand, million, billion)，no matter in formats like 3 billion or 100,000,000, but in Chinese, the number is seperated by 4 digits, and this happens in every format except one, printed 100,000,000 format. The printed ditgit format is affected by western world and for international convenience. When we say or write it in Chinese we use "万"(ten thousand) and "亿"(one hundred million) which are 1,0000 and 1,0000,0000 (I never see this digit format which is seperated by comma every 4 digits), so every time I see something like 123 million or 123,456,789 in English, I'll seperated it from 3 by 3 to 4 by 4, million is 1,000,000 which is 100,0000, so 123 million which is 123,000,000 will be converted into 1,2300,0000 which is 1亿2300万, in my head.

[derefr]

A similar confusion used to arise between the American and British meanings of "billion." An American billion (now the only version) was a thousand million. In Britain, this unit was called a "milliard", and a British billion was equal to a million million instead.

Effectively, the British were thinking in terms of a billion being "made out of" millions, to create numbers that would look intuitively like "1,000000,000000."

[octatoan]

In India, it's three the first time (1,000), then two (1,00,000 = one lakh, 1,00,00,000 = one crore) after that.