How to say "twelve tigers" [duplicate]

Question

I learned that two tigers is said "两只老虎" but I wonder how to say twelve tigers, twenty two tigers in Chinese. Is that 十二只老虎 and 二十二只老虎 or 十两只老虎 and 二十两只老虎

Answer 1

As @songyuanyao says 十二只老虎 and 二十二只老虎 are correct.

You cannot use 兩 here unless you literally meant to say "12 ounces of tiger (meat?)". The reason is that 兩 actually means "one pair". That is, 两只老虎 is "a pair of tigers". Notice that it is specifically one pair; which means you cannot use 二十两 to mean "twenty pairs" either.

Now, 兩 does get used in bigger numbers. But that's only strictly for two of something". For example:

• 一千兩百 - "One thousand and two hundred"
• 兩百 - "two hundred"
• 兩百兆 - "two hundred trillion"

In these cases, you are saying "a pair of one hundred", regardless of the rest of the number. This works because 100 is a named number in Chinese (as it is in English). The other numbers this works for are:

• 千 - thousand
• 萬 - ten thousand
• 億 - hundred million
• 兆 - trillion / million
• ...and other ridiculously large numbers that you'll likely never ever encounter.