A common mistake by Japanese students is not to use “and” when saying numbers. So let’s take a look at when we should say “and”; when we shouldn’t say “and”; and the correct pronunciation of “and”.
“and” is used with any number with three digits or more. For example, the number 180 should be said as:
one hundred and eighty.
376 should be said as:
three hundred and seventy-six
4,521
four thousand five hundred and twenty-one
So where do we put the “and”?
For example, why don’t we say four thousand “and” five hundred twenty-one? Well the answer is we always put “and” before any number between 1 and 99. So clearly four thousand is not between 1 and 99 so we don’t use it here, and similarly, 500 is not between 1 and 99 so not before 500, but 21 is between 1 and 99 and therefore needs “and” before you say it.
Just for fun, let’s take a look at a long number and see how many times we can use “and”
136,256,501
The number should be read as:
one hundred “and” thirty-six million, two hundred “and” fifty-six thousand, five hundred “and” one
Yay! Three times in one number.
So why is it not heard so often by students? Well, when a native speaker uses the word “and” it is often shortened to just ‘n’. Not just for numbers but in most spoken sentences and becomes ‘n’ （ん）. A famous example is Fish and Chips, said fish ‘n’ chips – you will even see it written on menus as fish ‘n’ chips.
So back to the numbers. The correct way to say 3,981 is:
three thousand nine hundred ‘n’ eighty-one
Or
three thousand nine hundred ん eighty-one (if you are Japanese :-))