Have you tried French numbers yet? I don’t mean the easy one, two, three stuff, I mean getting above seventy – which actually doesn’t exist in French!
Un, deux, trois, by the way. One, two three, just in case…
Anyway, French numbers. We’re pretty safe with a direct translation up to seventy, except twenty one, thirty one, etc which are actually “twenty and one”, vingt-et-un etc. (etc in French is etc – I blame the Latins).
So where were we? Seventy. In French it’s sixty-ten, soixante-dix. Then sixty eleven, sixty twelve (soixante-onze, soixante-douze) up to eighty – but they’re not finished with messing you about yet!
You’ve guessed, there’s no eighty. It’s not sixty-twenty either, that would be far too simple. For the French it’s literal translation is four-twenty, quatre-vingt!
Bear with me. Eighty one therefore is quatre-vingt-et-un, four twenty and one. Eighty two is quatre-vingt-deux and so on. What happens at ninety? Well of course they mix the lot. It’s four twenty eleven – quatre-vingt-onze. Ninety two is four twenty twelve, then it’s four twenty thirteen, all the way to four twenty nineteen (or ninety nine as we like to say) quatre-vingt-dix-neuf.
How confusing do you think a hundred is going to be then? Actually, it’s not. It’s Cent. Simple as that. A Thousand is Mille, A Million is just getting too easy – million. Yep, same as English. Are you breathing a sigh of relief? Should you ever need billion, it’s milliard.
So how do you make learning French numbers easy? To be honest, I’ve never come across a better way than simple practice and writing it down. There’s something much more powerful about writing stuff down on paper than just thinking it. Don’t ask me why it works, it just does.
If you’ve got some French coins (it will work with any currency but obviously French is better practice) try choosing some at random and adding them up. Every time you see numbers, try converting them. We went to French bingo locally (which you will probably see advertised as “le lotto“). It was quite a laugh but also great practice. I know that’s not practical for everyone but if you try taking every opportunity to try your numbers, and try making it a game so that it’s fun, you’ll get along much quicker. It’s getting the numbers up to a hundred right that is the hardest. It’s relatively easy to add three hundred once you’ve worked out the seventy seven, for example. That’s trois-cents-soixante-dix-sept, by the way.
At first it’s not easy because it’s something we learn from childhood and we’re accustomed to our way of doing it. Practice is the key and, when you hear it from someone else, concentration because French numbers are a little deceptive. We think we’re hearing sixty but if the French follow it with “onze” it becomes seventy-one. The trick is to just wait a second, wait until you’ve heard the whole number. Next year is going to be an easy one, by the way, 2010 is deux-mille-dix. Simple!
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