Russian Numbers: Count From 0 to 1000 With Audio

Numbers 0 to 20

Start here. Zero through ten are the irreducible building blocks - learn them cold. Eleven through nineteen are formed regularly from a root plus the ending -надцать (literally an old form of on ten), so once you can hear the pattern they are easy: одиннадцать, двенадцать, тринадцать and so on up to девятнадцать. Twenty, двадцать, opens the next layer.

One small but important detail: один (one) and два (two) change form for gender. One is один (masculine), одна (feminine), одно (neuter); two is два (masculine and neuter) but две (feminine). Every other number from this list keeps a single form.

Tens up to 100

The tens are mostly built from the single digits. Note сорок (forty) and девяносто (ninety), which are special one-off words, and сто (one hundred), which is short and irregular. The middle tens (пятьдесят, шестьдесят, семьдесят, восемьдесят) are a digit fused with -десят, the genitive plural of ten.

To build a two-digit number you simply say the ten, then the unit, with no joining word: двадцать один (21), тридцать пять (35), девяносто девять (99). There is nothing extra to memorize once you know the tens and the units.

Hundreds and thousands

The hundreds follow a clear pattern from сто: двести (200), триста (300), четыреста (400), then пятьсот, шестьсот, семьсот, восемьсот, девятьсот for 500-900. Тысяча is one thousand, and миллион is one million.

Larger numbers are read left to right just like English: тысяча девятьсот девяносто девять is 1999. The grammar of large numbers (which case the counted noun takes) gets intricate, but for reading and saying the number itself the system is fully regular.

Ordinal numbers (1st to 10th)

Ordinals (first, second, third) are adjectives, so they agree with their noun in gender, number and case - the forms below are the masculine singular. Most are regular, but первый (first), второй (second) and третий (third) are worth memorizing as a set since they appear constantly in dates and floors.

You will use ordinals for dates (первое января, the first of January), floors of a building, and ranking. As adjectives they behave exactly like the color and quality adjectives you meet elsewhere in the vocabulary cluster.

Practice the numbers