Numbers in German: 1 to a Billion (Complete Guide)

Numbers are the first thing you actually need. The price, the time, the platform, the address, your age. You can survive without saying "the library is open". You cannot survive without understanding zwölf Euro▶.

German numbers are logical, regular, and almost entirely predictable. There is exactly one genuinely strange thing about them, and it will bother you for about a month.

Let's get that out of the way first.

The backwards rule

German says the units before the tens. All of them, from 21 to 99.

einundzwanzig▶ is one-and-twenty. Not twenty-one. One first.

English used to do this too. Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. It survives in that nursery rhyme and nowhere else.

Why this actually matters, and it is not about grammar. When someone says a price at normal speed, you hear the small number first and your brain locks onto it. sechsundvierzig▶ starts with sechs, and you think "six" for a fraction of a second before the vierzig arrives and you have to reassemble the whole thing backwards. That reassembly is what makes you slow, and it is why numbers stay hard long after your grammar is fine.

It gets worse at three digits: dreihundertsiebenundzwanzig▶ is 327: hundreds first, then units, then tens. You have to hold the middle in memory while the end arrives.

There is no trick. It only becomes automatic through hearing it fast, many times, which is the whole point of the practice section below.

1 to 20

From 13 up it is just digit + zehn, exactly like English -teen.

Two irregulars worth noting: 16 is sechzehn▶, not sechszehn (the s drops), and 17 is siebzehn▶, not siebenzehn (the en drops). Say them out loud and you can hear why: the full forms are clumsy.

The tens

Same two contractions: sechzig▶ (not sechszig) and siebzig▶ (not siebenzig).

And one spelling oddity: 30 is dreißig▶, with ß, not -zig. It is the only one. Nobody knows why, and you just learn it.

Building any number

units + und + tens, written as one word:

• 34 = vier + und + dreißig = vierunddreißig▶
• 78 = acht + und + siebzig = achtundsiebzig▶

The one rule to remember: 1 becomes ein, not eins.

21 is einundzwanzig▶, never einsundzwanzig. The s only survives when the number stands completely alone: Wie viele? Eins.▶

Table: 1 to 100

Hundreds and thousands

hundert▶ and tausend▶, without ein. German says hundert, not einhundert, in normal speech. (Einhundert exists and sounds formal, like reading out a cheque.)

But at a million, the ein comes back and the word becomes feminine: eine Million▶. It also takes a plural: zwei Millionen▶.

Everything under a million is written as one word. That is where the famously terrifying German numbers come from:

siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig▶ = 777 777.

It looks impossible. It is just seven hundred seven and seventy thousand seven hundred seven and seventy with the spaces deleted. Nobody memorises these. They assemble them.

The billion trap

This is the one that costs real money, and English speakers are its main victims.

A German Billion▶ is not a billion. It is a trillion.

German uses the long scale: every new word is a thousand times bigger than the last, and there is a separate word, Milliarde, for 10⁹. English uses the short scale, where billion is 10⁹.

So when a German newspaper writes 3 Billionen Euro, it means 3 trillion, a thousand times more than an English reader assumes. This is a genuine, recurring translation error in real journalism.

The rule to hold onto: English billion = German Milliarde▶. Not Billion.

And beyond:

Notice the pattern: German alternates -illion and -illiarde. Every English word is offset by one step. French, Spanish and most of Europe do it the German way. English is the outlier here, not German.

Ordinals

The rule is pleasantly simple: -te up to 19, -ste from 20 up.

Four irregulars: erste▶, dritte▶, siebte▶ (not siebente), achte▶ (one t, not achtte).

In writing, ordinals are a number plus a full stop: 3. Stock = 3rd floor. 1. Mai = 1st of May. If you see a date written 24.12.2026, that is 24 December: day first, and the dots are ordinals.

Fractions, decimals and percentages

The punctuation is reversed from English, and this one is practical:

• The comma is the decimal point: 3,14 is drei Komma vierzehn▶.
• The dot separates thousands: 1.000 means one thousand.

So a price tag reading 1.500 in Berlin is fifteen hundred, not one and a half. And €2,50 is two euros fifty.

Telling the time: the half trap

This one genuinely catches people out, and it can make you an hour early.

halb drei▶ means half past TWO, not half past three.

German counts towards the coming hour: halb drei is "half way to three" = 2:30. English counts from the hour just gone.

Get halb wrong and you miss the train. It is worth drilling on its own.

The numbers you'll use first

Forget counting to a hundred. Here is what you need in your first hour:

Gleis sieben▶ is the one that matters in Germany. Platform announcements are fast, and the platform number is the only part you cannot afford to miss.

How this becomes automatic

Reading this table does nothing for you when the price arrives at full speed and your brain needs two seconds to flip sechsundvierzig around.

Numbers are where the gap between knowing and being able to say is at its most brutal, because they always arrive fast and without context to help you guess.

Three things:

1. Out loud, and fast. Take fünfundvierzig▶ and change one element: sechsundvierzig, fünfundfünfzig, fünfundvierzig Euro. Build these variations into spaced repetition practice, and treat speed as the mechanism, not a bonus: slowly, your brain has time to flip the number consciously, and that conscious flip is exactly what you are trying to remove.
2. Through your ears, never off the page. You will hear prices, not read them. Listen and repeat right behind, which is shadowing.
3. Your numbers. Your age, your phone number, your floor, your train time. Those are your language islands, and they beat counting to a hundred every time.

That is exactly what the Hyperpolyglot app is built for: you write the phrases your life actually needs, they come back in a native voice, and you loop them until they arrive without the flip. Available on iOS, Android, and Web.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Saying the tens first. 21 is one-and-twenty. Every time, up to 99.
2. Saying einsundzwanzig. It is einundzwanzig▶. The s only survives when 1 stands alone.
3. Hearing halb drei as 3:30. It is 2:30. German counts towards the hour.
4. Translating Billion as billion. It is a trillion. English billion is Milliarde▶.
5. Reading 1.500 as one and a half. The dot separates thousands.
6. Saying einhundert in conversation. It is just hundert▶.
7. Writing sechszehn or siebenzig. The contractions are sechzehn▶ and siebzig▶.
8. Fearing the long compound numbers. They are assembled, not memorised.
9. Practising silently. Numbers arrive fast in real life. They train out loud or not at all.

Keep Reading

• Hello in German -- the first phrases
• Numbers in Russian -- compare a very different counting system
• Spaced Repetition -- how to automate the backwards flip
• Language Islands -- picking your own numbers