26/07/2026
Seeing as it’s summer some trivia for you:
In Slovenian and Irish you become a “teenager” at 12 and 11 respectively, not 13 as in English, which is just down to our confusing words for 11 and 12.
They are so confusing in fact that some maths teachers (me included) would like primary school children to be allowed to call them tenenone (10 & 1), tenentwo and so on.
We’re calling for an international standard:
No more “once” in Spanish or “onze” in French for beginners: 11 would be
🇪🇸 dieciuno
🇫🇷 dix-un
🇬🇧 tenenone
As crazy as that feels, we decimalised currency in Cymraeg 🏴 they’ve actually already changed the names of numbers in this way, and research shows that it had a positive effect for maths education.
Chinese has the same kind of number system already. Once you can count to ten you can guess the names of numbers after that except for 100, 1000, 10000 and so on.
