How old are you?

Nobody in Russian is twenty

English makes age a property of the person: I am twenty. Russian gives the years to the person: to me – twenty years. The pronoun therefore appears in a special shape, and there are only three you need: мне, тебе, вам. Take them as fixed blocks. They are the dative case, and the dative gets a unit of its own later; right now nothing is gained by taking them apart.

The word for year then behaves exactly like рубль did with prices, and the same rule of the last word decides everything: ending in 1 gives год, ending in 2, 3 or 4 gives года, and everything else – 5 and up, 0, and the row 11–14 – gives лет. That third form comes from a different word altogether, which is why it looks unrelated: learn it whole.

Reading a phone number

Russians do not read a phone number digit by digit. They cut it into groups and read each group as one whole number: 903 123-45-67 becomes девятьсот три, сто двадцать три, сорок пять, шестьдесят семь. This is why the hundreds and the tens from the previous lesson matter so much – a phone number is where you meet them at speed.

Birthdays and dates

День рождения is the birthday, and the question is Когда у вас день рождения? The full answer needs the day as an ordinal numeral (первое, второе, двадцать третье), and those come in this unit's bonus lesson. Until then, answering with the month alone is completely normal, and so is giving the year of birth as a plain number.

Сколько тебе лет? – Мне двадцать три года.How old are you? – I am twenty-three.

Мой телефон: девятьсот три, двенадцать, тридцать четыре, пятьдесят шесть.My phone: nine-oh-three, twelve, thirty-four, fifty-six.