Article: A degree in Spanish got me my fi rst job as a journalist, with an international press agency in Mexico City, but it didn’t stop me from making mistakes as a young reporter.
  I had just arrived in the Mexican capital after a Greyhound bus journey all the way from New York and the job interview was a test of my language skills. In my new role, day shifts were spent on the streets in political rallies and nights were spent alone in the offi ce, coordinating the news from areas of fi ghting in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and the rest of Central America. But, I also had to report on occasional disasters: fi res, fl oods and explosions at fi rework factories.
  It was as a reporter that I soon found out that I was as bad at understanding numbers in Spanish as I was at calculating them in English. Once, when I meant to call the police, I got a Mexican grandmother out of bed at 2am because I had misunderstood a number and dialled a wrong digit. Even worse, there were too many victims in my stories – almost 83 dead in a fi re at 6pm turned out to be as few as 38 by 7pm; 12 people injured in a coach crash soon became two and so it went on. Finally, I got a call from the main offi ce in Washington. “I don’t know what training you have had,” an editor shouted, “but has no one ever told you a death toll can’t go down?!”
  Why are numbers in another language such a problem? It may be because of different numbering systems. In German, for example, which belongs to the same Indo-European language family as English, 2.30pm becomes halb drei (half of three) and 21 becomes einundzwanzig (one and twenty). Different number systems can clearly cause confusion.
  Some experts believe there is a link between dyscalculia – the diffi culty in understanding arithmetic – and problems learning foreign languages, particularly if languages are learnt by rote. But, some students who struggle to learn languages with a grammar textbook may thrive in a foreign-language setting, where learning is more natural and less reliant on sequences of adjectives, prepositions and so on. In my case, I have always found languages quite easy, apart from the numbers.
  But, perhaps it’s also because you often hear numbers in a non-native language out of context or in isolation. The listener might have switched off from the foreign language and be unable to suddenly tune in. I talked to multilingual friends and found that many can be fl uent in French or Italian when ordering from a restaurant menu, for example, but freeze if they have to communicate numbers, especially over the phone. Numbers seem to be taxing, but no one could really say why.
  In my case, my problems with numbers in a foreign language followed me from Mexico to other countries and from Spanish to German and Portuguese. But, in that fi rst journalism job, getting the numbers wrong didn’t always add up to failure.
  One night, a Mexican colleague learnt that the American consul in the port city of Veracruz was being held hostage at gunpoint in his offi ce. With no senior English-speaking reporter in the offi ce, I had to try to reach the consulate by phone. I got the phone number wrong and I was put through to an extension elsewhere in the building. The identity of the person who took my call was unmistakable: I chatted for 15 minutes to the gunman. I didn’t persuade him to put away his gun – but my reputation as a reporter rose overnight.