Actually, the system in both China and India looks quite peculiar to our western eyes. The separation system used here was clearly Chinese.

 

http://www.statisticalconsultants.co.nz/blog/how-the-world-separates-its-digits.html

My understanding is that that's how you read the numbers in Chinese, Korean and Japanese for example, but not how you write them down. In my experience with Japanese that seems to be the case, but Wikipedia does state as much of Chinese, Korean and other languages/regions with India being the one exception that separates every hundred instead. Though Wikipedia isn't exactly infallible either so who knows.

Edited January 21, 20197 yr by algroth

When it comes to reliable sources, Wikipedia certainly isn't one.

 

I also don't exactly know how this goes, but I do find it interesting that both India and China would appear to use systems rather different to ours here in the West (and here in the West there's a general distinction between English-speaking vs. others).

I only found out recently that Germans (and maybe others) use .'s instead of ,'s for the 000 separator.

 

It can be jarring seeing an invoice like that. 

 

The "." is only used in English speaking countries. The rest of the world uses "," to separate the decimals.