Zero to twenty

The first eleven words: 0 to 10

Numbers are the part of a language you need before you can hold a conversation: a price, a platform, a floor, a phone number. Learn them as sounds, with the stress marked – Russian numerals are ordinary words, and the stress is rarely where you would guess: один is о-ДИН, not О-дин.

From 11 to 19 nothing new has to be learned: each one is a unit with -надцать glued on, an old way of saying on ten. The stress moves onto -НА-, with two exceptions worth marking now: одИннадцать and четЫрнадцать.

один agrees, два picks a side

Two of these numerals are not neutral about gender. один behaves like a possessive and takes the gender of its noun, exactly as мой does. два has only two shapes: два for masculine and neuter, две for feminine. From три upwards the numeral itself never changes again. In the table below, notice that the noun after два picks up an ending of its own – брат becomes брата: that is the counting form, and the next lesson takes it properly.

Asking сколько

Сколько? is the one question word you need here: how many, how much. It can stand completely alone, and the answer is a bare numeral, with no verb: Сколько? – Пять. After it, a person is counted with the fixed form человек: сколько человек, десять человек.

У меня один брат и две сестры.I have one brother and two sisters.

Сколько человек? – Одиннадцать.How many people? – Eleven.