Counting money

Revision as of 07:54, 18 November 2011 by Gregory.mcandrews (talk | contribs)

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

  • 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:

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

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

Sources and further reading

Books