Numbers in French – Get ready to travel!

Its that time of year when travellers are preparing for their holidays, and going through the checklists making sure you have all the correct documents in place (Have you got a current GHIC card? See this blog post…. )

Another thing that few of us ever do is brush up our language, particularly numbers in French – yes, its in the grey matter somewhere – but often needed quickly and accurately to help communication on your journey, so a little number refresher.

Like many English, I have struggled with numbers in French  at times, and try to always get a bit of a refresher in to keep my numbers sharp.

1-20 are easy….. but then we have 21… vingt et un….. Then back to a reasonably logical sequence until we get to 31… trente et un…. And so on until we get to 69…. soixante neuf 

Now what IS 70?????   Ah –  soixante dix …. then soixante onze… soixante douze….

Then we reach 80 and the fun really begins!  4 X 20 – Quatre vingts…. quatre vingts et un… quatre vingts deux…… 90 is coming up……. ????

Quatre vingts dix….. quatre vingts onze….. up to quatre vingts dix neuf….. Finally we reach the sanctuary of ‘Cent’- 100 and we just put that in front – so for 121…. cent vingt et un. 

Phone numbers

In France phone numbers are almost always written and given in pairs, so 44 18 23 48 08 47 becomes  quarante-quatre  dix-huit  vingt-trois   quarante-huit  zero-huit   quarante-sept .

When speaking with a fast talking native it is very often to get this wrong, so both listening and speaking practice with numbers in French is a great preparation for your stay in France.

Number exercises

There are a lot of games and other exercises online: One that Team FFF find useful is at Games for Language.com and daily practice with spoken French is also a good thing – A member of the Team is a regular Duolingo user

Its always good to have a grasp of your numbers – but if not, the time honoured method of pen and paper can still be the universal language to make sure everyone understands!