Thanks everyone!
The reason this is particularly confusing for me is because I am not a native speaker of English myself.

Occassionally (rarely) I get caught out by something - recently it tends to be US-specific expressions because I don't get exposed to them so much..

In my previous jobs a senior American boss had a bit of a "thing" for me and kept coming up and saying COMPLETELY incomprehensible things... He was quite the big cheese there, so I just smiled and played along even though I hardly understood a word he was saying. To this day I have no idea of half the things he was on about. "Big Al".... ROFL!!!! All my colleagues thought it was hilarious because they knew I couldn't understand him. He grew up in Brooklyn.

Now I got to check my understanding of Pimsleur against what Olya is saying.

Darn!!! Is it possible that the Pimsleur speaker was saying "ten PAST x" and I understood it as "ten TO x...."? That would be incredibly confusing...