Nummern

In addition to the well known differences with the metric system and Celsius temperatures used here, there are many more differences to the number system in Germany that I have to learn and get used to.

First of all, time is almost always given in "military" time, but I have yet to see a 24 hour clock on a wall; they are all 12 hours like in the US. It seems odd to meet people at times like 16:30. The dates are also different. Here the day of the month is written before the number of the month, like 28.3.2008. For more than half of the month this is fine, but in the first two weeks it can confuse me.

Also, the 1s here are written like 7s and the 7s have a slash through them. This created a problem last week. At my job we have to keep track of a large number of stocks that are labeled by number (with a "backwards" date below). My technician is German and we are in Germany and we need a standard so I've tried to use the German standard, but I make mistakes. The biggest mistake is correcting things that aren't mistakes. So in copying the number I "corrected" 7s by adding a slash through them, but these were actually 1s. So we had to backtrack once we realized this and correct them again before we lost track.

Also, commas and decimal points are interchanged, as in the date example I gave above. 1.630 here is one thousand six hundred and thirty, not one point six three (the later is 1,63). And, a long - appears to mean zero, so prices can be marked as 1,- euros, which means one euro even without any cents (not one thousand euros).

Another thing, that is not really different from the US but I am not used to it, phone numbers start with a "+", which I am told means a zero. It's because there are so many international phone calls here, all these little countries are crammed in together, that they start phone numbers with the international code (+49 is the German one). Perhaps the EU will adopt a common calling code?

And finally, the last one that comes to mind, in spoken German a number like 48 is, literally translated, eight and forty, which often sounds to me like 84, because I am still learning the German names for numbers. For a small number like 48 this is not so bad and I am starting to get the hang of it, but for reading off a long number, like 728431, they will say two and seventy, four and eighty, one and thirty, which so far invariably results in me writing down the wrong number, but eventually I may get the hang of it.