Say "twenty-one" to a German and they will hear one-and-twenty. That is not a joke — it is the rule. German flips the order, and the number system you learned as a child stops working on day one.
The good news: German vocabulary numbers are almost perfectly regular. Learn fifteen words and one trick, and you can build every number up to a million by yourself.
What you will get from this guide
- The eleven core numbers you actually need to memorise
- The flipped-order rule explained once, clearly
- Pronunciation that stops you saying something embarrassing
- Ordinal numbers, prices, phone numbers, and dates
The Eleven Numbers You Must Memorise
Everything else is arithmetic. These are the only German numbers you learn by heart.
Learn these cold. No excuses, no flashcards left for tomorrow. They are the bricks; the rest is mortar.
The Teens: One Rule, Two Exceptions
German teens follow a beautiful pattern: number + zehn.
Only 11 and 12 are rogues. Notice 16 and 17 get shorter — sechzehn, not sechszehn. Say sechszehn and Germans will understand you, but they will also hear the accent.
The Tens and the Famous Flip
The tens are their own small family: zwanzig, dreißig, vierzig, fünfzig, sechzig, siebzig, achtzig, neunzig. Careful — 30 is dreißig with that sharp ß, not dreizig. And 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 all end in -zig while 30 keeps its ß.
Now the flip. From 21 to 99, German says the unit first, then und, then the ten:
- 21 = einundzwanzig (one-and-twenty)
- 45 = fünfundvierzig (five-and-forty)
- 78 = achtundsiebzig (eight-and-seventy)
Two details. Firstly, it is einundzwanzig, not einsundzwanzig — that final "s" of eins disappears when a word follows. Secondly, the whole thing is written as one word. No spaces, no hyphens. vierundneunzig, not vier und neunzig.
Build Any Number Up to 100
Here is the recipe you will use for the rest of your German life.
This is why listening matters so much. Written, the flip is clear. Heard at speed in a train announcement, zweiundsiebzig flies past and your brain is still hunting for "seventy".
Prices, Phone Numbers and Dates
Numbers stop being theory the moment money appears.
That decimal swap is the number one confusion for English speakers. 3,5 Meter means three and a half metres, not three thousand five hundred.
Numbers only stick when you hear them at full speed
Ready to turn reading into real German? Start your self-paced course today.
Start the German course →Create a free accountReading neunundneunzig is easy. Catching it in a German airport announcement is a different skill entirely. Self-paced practice with an AI voice tutor builds that ear fast — you hear the flip, you answer, you get instant feedback, all at your own pace. Button: Practise German numbers live →
Ordinal Numbers: 1st to 20th
Ordinals matter for dates, floors and ranking.
The pattern: 1–19 take -te, 20 and above take -ste. Two exceptions, erste and dritte, plus achte which drops a letter. Floor numbers use ordinals as well — erster Stock, zweiter Stock — though the ground floor is the Erdgeschoss. Learn vocabulary as whole phrases, not isolated digits, and this stops being confusing.
The Three Traps That Catch Everyone
First, the flip. Your brain reads "twenty-one" and wants zwanzigeins. German says einundzwanzig. Drill this until it stops feeling wrong.
Second, the disappearing letters. eins becomes ein, sechs becomes sech, sieben becomes sieb. German hates a clumsy consonant cluster.
Third, numbers in the wild are never slow. Textbook drills teach you the shape. Only listening teaches you the speed.
Turn 1–100 into reflex, not calculation
Ready to turn reading into real German? Start your self-paced course today.
Start the German course →Create a free accountCounting to twenty in your head is not fluency — hearing siebenundvierzig and answering instantly is. Our self-paced German course puts numbers into real conversations: prices, times, addresses, appointments. You practise out loud with an AI voice tutor that gives you instant feedback. Button: Start counting in German →
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does German say 21 as "one and twenty"? It is a grammatical inheritance. Old Germanic languages placed the unit before the ten, and German kept it while English switched. It applies to every number from 21 to 99, without exception.
How do you say 30 in German? Dreißig. Watch the ß — it is not dreizig. Every other ten ends in -zig, which makes 30 the odd one out and the most commonly misspelled number for beginners.
Is "eins" or "ein" correct? Both, depending on position. Use eins when the number stands alone or ends a sentence. Use ein when a noun follows: ein Buch, and in compounds like einundzwanzig.
How long does it take to learn German numbers 1–100? The vocabulary takes an afternoon. The listening reflex takes weeks. Learners who drill ten minutes daily typically recognise spoken numbers comfortably within a month, according to the CEFR-aligned planning estimates most schools use. See the Goethe-Institut's A1 framework for the level expectations.