Chinese Numbers Explained

In addition to talking about how long something takes, you might want to talk about how often something happens, or how often you do something (like take some medicine, or trips to Hawaii). There are several ways to express frequency, the most common being

次

cì

, and some other common ways we'll look at below. In general, to express the frequency of events

次

cì

is used after the number: To express the ordering of times of some event, you can use 第 and 次 together (Notice that here you use

二

èr

instead of

两

liǎng

): You can also use

回

huí

to express frequency: Another word that is used to express frequency is

遍

biàn

. This word emphasizes the experience of the whole process of something from beginning to end, so it is frequently used with things like reading books or watching movies: Finally, we have

趟

tàng

. This word is specifically used to refer to trips, as the root meaning of the character is to take a journey.

We can also talk about rates: how often something happens within some period of time:

率

lǜ

. For example, once per hour, twice per day, three times a week, once a month, etc. In Chinese to express how often you do something, the time unit comes first, then the number of times it happens: Notice in the previous example we have a different word for day:

天

tiān

than would be used in a date. Here's another example with the same pattern: Another variation uses the word for each/every:

每

měi

in front of the duration. So "each day" or "every day" instead of "a day" or "one day": Notice the different word used for a duration of an hour

小时

xiǎo shí

, as opposed to an hour on a clock

点钟	diǎn zhōng

. Here's a few more examples: One last note about usage in the context of a larger phrase. While in English we typically keep the entire frequency phrase together, for example "I go to the bank twice each month", in Chinese the components are often split into parts. The general form looks like this: Subject (time period) verb (number of times) object. So the same phrase in Chinese would read like this:

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Chinese Numbers for iPhone & iPad lets you practice numbers and counting anytime, anywhere you are. Has two modes to input numbers and a challenging game to test your translation skills.