Sounds like you just have to get used to the endianness. It’s actually more consistent; in English, you say four-teen but also twenty-four. In German, they picked the way that is most logical for counting, and stuck with it throughout.
In theory, yes, yet my adult brain cannot process correctly decoding this reversed order quickly, under pressure, over the phone in writing, even though I learned to be fluent in German. I guess you have to grow up with this system so it imprints on your subconscious from an early age, else, if you grow up with another system, and need to switch later in life, it's game over.
Learning this number system is easy, but under pressure over the phone, this reverse pair system falls apart quickly as you tend to write the first digit you hear instead of waiting for the full pair, which is why it's not used in military/critical radio transmissions, because it opens the gates to many errors and proves the system is broken for anything else than casual private use.
I can say that struggle is not universal: I learned German as an adult, and don't struggle with writing down numbers I hear spoken. In fact, I'd never even thought about it being hard.
Every once in a while I say a number backwards (like once or twice a year), but I usually catch myself half-way after spitting it out.
The system is not broken. It works for tens of millions of people, including over the phone. You’re just not wired for it. Welcome to living in your second language!
I will say that even an adult brain can adapt to foreign ways. It does get easier, though in the process you lose something of your original language.
>It works for tens of millions of people, including over the phone.
Except it doesn't work well, as proved by the fact that this system is not used in the military since even top comment in this thread where a German agrees that even he gets confused by numbers in pairs over the telephone and as proven by the fact that Norway transitioned from the "German" way to the "English" way precisely to fix this issue.
I see you're very defensive about your culture/way of doing things, but just because some linguistical quirks exist to date in some languages, is in no way poof that they are good or that it works well, it's just proof that inertia is very strong as these issues get grandfathered in over time since transitioning to something better is too expensive for entire countries to make (look at why the imperial system is still used even though it's inferior to metric).
And for some countries/cultures, introducing certain linguistical quirks on purpose and keeping them was, and still is, a matter of national pride and differentiation between their culture and other very similar cultures (see French vs Belgian French vs Canadian French vs Swiss French, or German vs Austrian German vs Swiss German), so changing something for the better would be admitting something was wrong all along in their culture and would definitely face backlash from conservatives and purists, though Norway did the change successfully from the "German" way to the "English" way of speaking pairs of numbers in order to fix the confusion issues I mentioned.
We say ‘fourteen’ but not ‘four and ten’. Fourteen comes out as one word, like eleven. If ‘fiveforty’ were a word it would be easier to process as one word instead of five and forty which tends to be processed as two words.
Vierzehn and Vierundfünfzig are single words in German, but separate words in English. "Fourteen" (four and ten) being a single word is actually strange in English because the language normally splits words like these.
English has decided to use single words up to 20. Other European languages stop at 100. Both are arbitrary and right or wrong in their own way.
The English word would be "five and forty" because "fiveforty" would probably mean 200 going by traditional English (in the same say "four score and seven" means 4*20+7, not 24+7).
I’d say that the teens having a different structure in English is also weirdly out of place, not that the German counting makes sense. Having a structure where you always count from highest to lowest, and in the order you would write down the number, just makes more sense. It’s always been weird to me that we have unique words for the tens numbers in English.
