Sad fact: French Canadian don't use the (much better) Swiss/Belgian septante/octante/nonante and the awareness in Quebec just isn't high enough to hope for a switch.

It's a shame because soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix are confusing to write (I probably made a mistake somewhere).

> French Canadian don't use the (much better) Swiss/Belgian septante/octante/nonante

Sorry for the mistake (I did check on wikipedia before adding Canada do the list but got it wrong).

> the awareness in Quebec just isn't high enough to hope for a switch.

Same in France. I believe most of us regard "septante/octante/nonante" as amusing and exotic sounding. Sadly, I've never heard anyone advocating for a switch.

Note that Belgians ans Swiss don't agree on 80. It's huitante on one side and octante on the other (but I don't remember which is which)

Interesting, I knew Swiss said octante and my Belgian friends all say octante as well. Perhaps it's a regional thing?

Swiss person here. This "octante" idea needs to die. In my 30 years in French speaking Switzerland, I've never heard or read "octante" ONCE. It might be used in Belgium, but I'm not even sure about that.

Not to be that guy that argues with a Swiss about how Swiss talk but we get broadcasts from "RTS Un" (I think that's what it's called) and the announcers most definitely say "octante". I also followed a few Swiss YouTubers a few years ago and they all said "octante" as well. Maybe it's a regional thing?

EDIT: Actually now that I dug up a bit more stuff it does seem like "huitante" is the one? Maybe I am just remembering wrong, feel free to ignore my ramblings.

I will indeed feel free to ignore your ramblings, because you're thinking of "huitante" :-P

I'm a french canadian and I've never in my life heard someone use "septante/octante/nonante". I understand the difficulty while learning French but, as a native speaker, we don't even think about it.

> As others said, French speakers parse "four-twenty-ten" as ninety.

But only 90 and 97-99 have "quatre vignt dix". 91-96 are written as "four-twenty-eleven" through "four-twenty-sixteen".

So you can't really avoid the complexity, because only half of the numbers in the 90s have '''90''' as part of the word.