The Number You Almost Misheard
You are doing a WACE listening task based on a phone message. A woman says she will arrive at achtzehn Uhr dreißig and that the meeting is in Raum zweiundzwanzig, not Raum zwölf. She adds that she has zwei Kinder and will bring drei Kollegen. The recording is played twice. On the first hearing you write: 'arrive 8:30, room 12, 2 kids, 3 colleagues.' Between playings you have 20 seconds to review. You notice the speaker said achtzehn, not acht, and zweiundzwanzig, not zwölf. The numbers zwei and drei appeared several times. You must decide which figures to trust before the second playing.
1. Which of your four figures are wrong, and how does German number formation explain the errors?
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Two figures are wrong. Time: achtzehn Uhr dreißig is 18:30 (6:30 pm), not 8:30. You heard acht and dropped the -zehn ending; achtzehn means eighteen. Room: zweiundzwanzig is 22, not 12. German says the units before the tens: zwei-und-zwanzig = 'two-and-twenty'. You likely caught zwanzig or zwölf and misassigned it.
The other two are correct: zwei Kinder (two children) and drei Kollegen (three colleagues). A strong answer explains that German two-digit numbers are spoken units first, then tens, which makes zweiundzwanzig (22) easy to confuse with zwölf (12) and zwei (2). The fix is to listen for the linking und and the final tens word, which determines the value.
2. What checking routine would you apply during the 20-second pause to catch such errors before the second playing?
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A practical routine:
- Flag, don't fix. Mark uncertain figures with a symbol (e.g. a question mark) rather than committing to a value.
- Reconstruct the number from its parts. For achtzehn, note 'eight + -teen ending = 18'. For zweiundzwanzig, note 'two + und + twenty = 22'.
- Check time format. Uhr with a number above 12 signals 24-hour time, so 18:30 is evening.
- Separate similar-sounding items. Keep zwei (children) and drei (colleagues) in their own labelled slots so they do not bleed into the room number.
Why this matters: the second playing confirms or corrects flagged items without overwriting correct ones. Writing a confident wrong number first makes you likely to keep it. Flagging preserves doubt and directs attention on the replay.