Many years ago, in the late 1980's when I lived in Vancouver, I took night school courses to learn conversational Cantonese. I stopped when I moved to California in 1990 and all the vocabulary I acquired then has been slowly eroding. However, my previous post on spelling out numbers reminded me of how one says the numbers in Cantonese. Here are the numbers with their Chinese character and Cantonese pronunciation:

one	1	yāt	一
two	2	yih	二
three	3	sàam	三
four	4	sei	四
five	5	nǵh	五
six	6	luhk	六
seven	7	chat	七
eight	8	baat	八
nine	9	gáu	九
ten	10	sahp	十

Subsequent numbers are built logically from these. For example, eleven (11) is 十一, twenty-one (21) is 二十一 and thirty-one (31) is 三十一. In Cantonese you would pronounce 三十一 as "sàam sahp yāt".


A program equivalent to the one that counted the number of letters in the English spelling of numbers would probably count the strokes of the Chinese numbers. It would have a lot fewer special cases than the program I presented earlier.


I use the Yale Romanization for Cantonese since that's what I was taught long back. There is a lot of information about Chinese Numerals online.