Uno, dos, tres…
Numbers in Spanish
Numbers in Spanish are easy to learn! Let’s see why:
- Once you’ve learned numbers from 1 to 15 it gets easier. You probably know them already.
- Starting at 16 what we say is “ten plus six”: dieciséis (diez y seis). It’s just contracted into one word. This happens up to veintinueve (29).
- Starting at treinta (thirty) we say and write “thirty and one”, “thirty and two”, “thirty and three” and so on…
- Learn the numbers for the multiples of ten: veinte, treinta, cuarenta, cincuenta, sesenta, setenta, ochenta and noventa. They all end in -enta except veinte (twenty).
Then, it’s really easy – all numbers in Spanish after twenty-nine just involve adding the multiple of ten plus one to nine.
Ordinal numbers, on the other hand, are used to talk about floors in a house or building and years and semesters at school. In Spanish, we generally don’t use ordinal numbers to say the date:
However, we do use the ordinal number for “first” to say a date like May 1st (el primero de mayo).
Now, let’s see and hear the cardinal numbers from 1 to one million.
To finish this lesson, let’s learn the most important ordinal numbers.
In this post, we reviewed numbers in Spanish, including cardinal numbers and a sampling of ordinal numbers. Now you should have no problems saying ages, prices, or grade levels! If you haven’t seen our posts on other essential vocabulary topics, like Days of the week, months, seasons, and other expressions of time or now you can go on to learning how to Tell the time in Spanish.