2705: Chinese Fractions May 17, 2024

While nowadays, the Chinese write fractions in the same Arabic numerals as everyone else, traditionally they had their own system for writing out fractions. While some of the writing of numbers in Chinese may look like numerals, such as 一 (1),  二 (2), and  三  (3), each having the corresponding number of lines, zero is 零 supposedly related to the character for rain. 

Since these aren’t numerals or words exactly, but pictographs. Decimals are fairly straightforward: 三点二 for 3.2, with the 点 (dian) acting as a decimal point, but fractions are written differently. ⅔ would be written as 三分之二  which might look like “three parts of two” but in Chinese the numerator is written after the denominator. The 分之 basically mean “divides”, but not divided by in the order normally used in the West, because 3÷2 is not the same as 2÷3 aka ⅔. This works the same in percentages, also written in the reverse order it would be in English, 百分之二十 is simply “‘hundred’ divides 20”.