language: counting

When in primary school we were taught with coloured wooden blocks marked with notches how to count, addition, subtraction etc. For example ten was always red, five green, single units were yellow. To this day I still relate colours to shapes and numbers and vice versa. Red + green = 15. I'm 34 (three yellows + four yellows) and an accountant.

I thought I was the only weirdo in existence who thought numbers had gender and personality but I see I wasn't the only one! Even more bizarre though, is that I felt they had "ages" also--1 & 2 were older, 3 & 4 were younger, 5 & 6 older, etc.

I was convinced that there was a number called "eleventeen", but was never sure how to count to it or where it lay in the great order of numbers. I just knew it was there.

I sincerly believed that numbers only went up to ten when i was around 2-3. Yep the next year when we started things like 20 and 100 i was amazed and quite convinced that they had just been invented. yep i was very proud to be around for the invention of numbers over ten.

I used to think certain numbers had personalities.9 was very smart and manipulative, and if other numbers didn't watch it, she'd add herself to them and rob them of their rightful place in the "teens". 4 wouldn't become 14, but only 13, etc. Four and six were nice, but easily fooled (especially 4), 7 was smart and 8 was bossy like my sister. Go figure! ;)

Though I knew that numbers were just numbers, negative numbers were somewhat evil to me. They messed up entire equasions by changing signs, and were just plain evil. I always liked cancelling negatives or adding larger positives to negatives to make them positive. To this day, I still enjoy getting rid of negatives.

It always confused me when my mom would ask someone what "percent" certain they were, and they would answer 80% or 90%. I thought, if you're certain, you're certain, and these people all must have an agreed upon number that would mean they are certain. Finally, my mom asked me the question one day, and I asked her "out of what number?" I thought it was a perfectly intelligent question (since the number could be anything) and she said 100. So I was 100% certain. What bothered me though, was that I would still hear other people quote other percents, yet my mom always told me the number was 100. It took me a while to realize you didn't always have to be 100% certain!

i could swear eleventeen was a number for the longest time -- it still sounds pretty convincing.

When I was about five or six I remember sitting in the school dinner hall boasting to my friends that I could count all the way to a thousand. Demonstrating I counted 1, 2, 3, ..., 99, 100, 101,... 108, 109, 1000. Incidentally one of the boys to whom I was boasting managed to count to 3000 without cheating when he was sixteen, one boring afternoon.

i used to believe that the number 4 was female, 5 was male and 6 was female.
4 and 6 would fight over 5 because they were so jealous of each other for being right next to him

When I learned that 1 times 0 is 0... And that 2x0 is 0... and that 3x0 is 0... Naturally, I concluded that ANY number multiplied by ANY other number is 0. Genius.

I was absolutely _crushed_ when I learned that there were numbers greater than ten. I had believed for... well, for months, I suppose (:-) that 10 was the biggest. When my mom broke the news, I cried for the rest of the day.

I come from Norway. When I was a child I believed that twenty and seventy was the same number, they sounded alike to me, in norwegian. So when I was told to count to a hundred I counted ...28,29,80,81...

When I was six I didn't know about carrying numbers (who does?). I thought that 66 + 66 = 1212 and proceeded to write this and many other incorrect equations on a piece of paper. My dad told me that was wrong but I argued with him about it.

When I was about 4 I decided that if you were born in a bigger year, that meant you were older. So if I was born in 1965, that meant I was older than someone born in 1964. Because 65 is bigger than 64. Just like being 4 years old was bigger than being 3 years old.

I had a little number puzzle where you fit the numbers 1-12 into notches. When I finished, I was so proud, because I could count all the numbers on the puzzle, and I was convinced that since 12 was such a huge number to a small child, there were no numbers higher, so I'd triumphantly shout, "Look! I can count to the end of the numbers," at random intervals.