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Chapter 2 of 8

Numbers and Counting

Learning to count in German is straightforward for the small numbers. The cardinal numbers begin with eins (one), zwei (two), drei (three), and you will quickly encounter sieben (seven), zehn (ten), and zwanzig (twenty). For larger round numbers, hundert means one hundred and tausend means one thousand. These are the building blocks for counting prices, telling time, and giving addresses or phone numbers.

One important quirk to remember when counting above twenty is that German inverts the order of digits compared to English. In English we say "twenty-one," but in German the ones digit comes first, attached to the tens. So 21 is einundzwanzig, literally "one-and-twenty," and 57 is siebenundfünfzig, literally "seven-and-fifty." Once you internalize this reversal, larger numbers become much easier to decode, because they all follow the same pattern: ones digit, then "und," then the tens digit, with the hundreds and thousands following normal English-style order.

All chapters
  1. 1Greetings, Courtesies, and First Conversations
  2. 2Numbers and Counting
  3. 3Nouns, Gender, and Articles
  4. 4Verbs: Conjugation and Negation
  5. 5Grammatical Cases and Prepositions
  6. 6Modal Verbs and Sentence Structure
  7. 7Practical Situations: Food and Travel
  8. 8Past Tense, Formality, and Tricky Vocabulary

Drill it

Reading is not remembering. These come from the German Basics deck:

Q

How do you say "Good morning" in German?

Guten Morgen

Q

How do you say "Good evening" in German?

Guten Abend

Q

How do you say "Good night" in German?

Gute Nacht

Q

How do you say "Hello" informally in German?

Hallo