Quote Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi View Post
I found that strange, but coins just confuse tourists.
From my point of view...it's not that coins confuse tourists. It's that some countries have coins that seem to have been designed to promote "hide and seek" game, with the user being the one that seeks the coins value...Like, literally. I had in my hand coins that had their date of being minted in larger numbers than their value. And their value wasn't characteristic nor in any way underlined to make it a focal point at all. It's like they were a nice, little picture on a piece of metal...oh, and serving in trade as a side note.

You need to understand that size of coins and their shape is absolutely irrelevant. There is only one kind of entity that cares about it universally, and that's a coin machine of any sort. For blind people it may be relevant only in their country of origin. Due to how different denominations may have varied sizes depending on the country (for example comparing 1 euro and 1 dollar).

Then there's also the fact that USA have entirely different system. There is cent, dime, nickel. I can know what half dollar and quarter dollar is...but dime and nickel?! Huh?! I'd need to look it up.

In Europe and, well, just about any country that normally uses metric system as well I recon, it's 1X (like 1 euro cent), 10X (like 10euro cents), 20X, 50X and so on. There is always a number and name of the value. 100 of the lower denomination (like cents) is a higher denomination (like a dollar/euro). And that's all. Then it's just pure math, you don't need to know absolutely anything about anything of that country. Just numbers. In USA I'd need to know what is nickel and what is dime as well.

And please, go ahead. Show me a mathematical value of this coin (on it, not on outside source).

It's like with time (AM/PM?!, 12AM is midday or midnight?! Not even English language professors know the difference, and it further varies between countries.), weight...well, the entire number systems. Just compare this to this. Knowing two tables in metric system, you can count to any number of any field. In imperial knowing two tables you don't even know half of it. There were catastrophes caused by these differences (tankers falling apart, satellites crashing down into ocean etc.). And you expect a random foreigner to understand the differences when he could go to a dozen other countries and not even know there is any other way of doing it?!
Do you even know what "milliard" is? No? If you expect people to know what a dime or nickel is, then you should know what miliard is. That's 1 000 000 000, in USA called billion. In Europe it's million, milliard, billion, billiard etc, while in USA it's million, billion, trillion, quadrillion etc.


These differences, however, have nothing to do with math itself. It's linguistics. The meaning of words is language. And unfortunately...mathematical language skills are not taught at foreign language classes, hence why so many people cannot understand the billion=milliard issue or the lower denominations of your coins.