Counting money

Chinese has a specific structure for talking about quantities for money:

Number + 块 + Number + 毛

The first number is the amount of whole RMB (or dollars etc.), and the second is the amount smaller units (e.g. cents). So 3.86 RMB is

• 三块八十六毛。

If the smaller units are only in tens, you can just say the number of tens. So 3.8 RMB is:

• 三块八

And if there's no smaller unit, e.g. 3 RMB, you can just say:

• 三块

块 is the more common, informal way to talk about money. More formally you can use 元 in exactly the same way. This is equivalent to the difference between "dollars" and "bucks" in American English, or "pounds" and "quid" in British English.