Caveat: ₩11100

I have become somewhat happy with my ability to understand spoken currency amounts in Korean.  When shopping at the quickie mart, I will deliberately avoid looking at the cash register when my purchases are rung up, so that I can test my ability to understand the clerk's recital of the amount due.  I've gotten pretty good at it, and most of the time, I can even give the correct amount of change if I have it and I'm trying to get rid of coins – which I often am.

But tonight's purchase amount threw me for a loop:  ₩11100.   The problem is that when you have one of something in Korean, you don't give the number – just the "counter" or the digit placeholder.   And there's a digit placeholder for each column in a long number, just like we have in English – hundred, thousand, million – but we're much less committed to using them.  So Korean has a ten-thousand placeholder (만 =man), a thousand placeholder (천 =cheon), and a hundred placeholder (벡 =baeg), and then the word for won (원 =weon).  So this price of ₩11100 (about 13 bucks) was 만천벡원 (man-cheon-baeg-weon) and there were no "digits" recited.

I was utterly nonplussed for a second.  It would be as if, in English, we said for, say, $1,001,100, "million thousand hundred dollars."

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