Learning a new language is hard, so it is always pleasant to discover easy to learn pockets in the language. The numbers above 10 are one such pocket.
In English, you have to learn quite a few words in order to count to 1000. There is of course, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Then there's eleven, which appears only once even if you count to infinity. Twelve. Thirteen. Twenty-one. Thirty-five. I won't try it , but I think you have to remember 1,000 different words in order to count to 1,000 in English.
Happily, Cantonese requires you to remember just 13 words:
a) 1 to 10: Yat, Yih, Sam, Say, M, Lok, Chat, Baht, Gau, Sap.
b) The number 0 : Leng
c) The word for hundred: Baak
d) and the number for thousand: chin
To say 11 in Cantonese, just juxtapose 10 and 1 : sap yat.
Twelve? It's just 10 and 2: sap yih.
To say 31, it's just 3 and 10 and 1: sam sap yat.
How about 88? It's just 8 and 10 and 8: baht sap baht.
To say 100, say : yat baak. Here are some more examples using baak:
102 - yat bak leng yih (not yat bak yih)
150 - yat bak m sap
451 - say baak m sap yat.
Let's get stratospheric and try 946. It's just 9 and 100 (gau baak) and 4 and 10 (say sap) and 6 (lok) : gau baak say sap lok.
Now let's do a moonshot and try 1 thousand: yat chin.
Two thousand: yih chin. (Remember our rule for whether to use yih or leung? It seems to apply nicely here).
One last try. Four thousand, seven hundred and twenty four (4,724): say chin chat baak yih sap say
And that's all there is to it.
Next: You can count to 5 thousand, but can you say 13.50?
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