Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to count from 0 to 100 in Russian and recognize the case-governing behavior that makes Russian numbers genuinely distinctive.

Lesson Explanation

Numbers 0-10: ноль 0, один 1, два 2, три 3, четыре 4, пять 5, шесть 6, семь 7, восемь 8, девять 9, десять 10.

Numbers 11-19 add -надцать to a shortened root, genuinely similar in spirit to English “-teen”: одиннадцать 11, двенадцать 12, тринадцать 13, четырнадцать 14, пятнадцать 15.

Tens follow a related but distinct pattern: двадцать 20, тридцать 30, сорок 40 (genuinely irregular, unrelated to “четыре”), пятьдесят 50, шестьдесят 60, семьдесят 70, восемьдесят 80, девяносто 90 (also irregular), сто 100.

A genuinely important preview of a feature covered fully in Part 5, Lesson 1: Russian numbers don’t just precede a noun neutrally — they genuinely change which grammatical case the following noun takes, an interaction with no equivalent in the languages covered elsewhere in this course catalog. The number один (one) also uniquely agrees in gender with its noun like an adjective (один стол, one table — masculine; одна книга, one book — feminine), while два, три, четыре force the following noun into the genitive singular, and пять and above force the genitive plural — a system that will make far more sense once the case system itself is introduced starting in Part 2, Lesson 2.

Practice Questions