Twenty to a thousand: prices

The tens

The tens are built from the units you already know: пять gives пятьдесят (five tens), шесть gives шестьдесят. Two of them refuse to play along and simply have to be memorised: сорок for 40 and девяносто for 90. Compound numbers are written as separate words with nothing joining them: 21 is двадцать один, 45 is сорок пять, 137 is сто тридцать семь.

The hundreds are the same trick one floor up: the unit plus a form of сто. Only двести, триста and четыреста look slightly different from the rest, which all end in -сот. A thousand is тысяча – a feminine noun rather than a numeral, which is why it looks so unlike its neighbours.

рубль, рубля, рублей

Here is the first place where the noun changes because of the number in front of it. Do not look for a rule about the whole price: look only at the last word of it. If the number ends in 1, the noun stays рубль; if it ends in 2, 3 or 4, it becomes рубля; after everything else – 5 and up, 0, and the whole teen row 11–14 – it becomes рублей. Treat the three shapes as a formula for now; they are cases, and the cases get their own units later.

Asking the price

Сколько стоит? is the question, and the thing you are asking about follows it: Сколько стоит хлеб? The answer is the number plus the right shape of рубль, with no verb needed. Two words judge the answer for you: дорого (expensive) and дёшево (cheap). The копейка is a hundredth of a rouble and survives mostly on price tags.

Сколько стоит хлеб? – Сорок два рубля.How much is the bread? – Forty-two roubles.

Молоко стоит девяносто рублей. Это дорого.The milk costs ninety roubles. That is expensive.