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

Numbers are the first thing you actually need. The price, the platform, the address, your age. You can survive without saying "the museum is interesting". You cannot survive without understanding двенадцать рублей▶.

Here is the good news and the bad news, and you should have both up front.

The good news: Russian numbers are beautifully regular. There is no backwards flip like German, no quatre-vingt-dix like French. Twenty-one is just twenty one.

The bad news: Russian numbers change the word that follows them. Two apples and five apples use different forms of "apple". This is the thing that makes Russian numbers famous, and it is the reason most guides quietly skip it.

We are not going to skip it. But we are going to put it in its place, because it matters less than it looks.

1 to 20

11 to 19 all end in -надцать▶, which is a worn-down version of "on ten". Learn 1 to 10 and the teens come almost free.

The tens

Two oddballs to just memorise: 40 is сорок▶ (not четыредесят) and 90 is девяносто▶ (not девятьдесят). Everything else is transparent: пятьдесят is literally "five tens".

Building any number: the easy part

Just say the parts in order. No and, no hyphen, no flip:

• 21 = двадцать один▶
• 45 = сорок пять▶
• 99 = девяносто девять▶
• 327 = триста двадцать семь▶

This is the same logic as English, and it is genuinely simple. If Russian numbers were only this, they would be easier than French.

Table: 1 to 100

The famous part: numbers change the next word

Here it is. Russian nouns take a different form depending on the number in front of them, and the pattern is genuinely strange:

So:

• один рубль▶ (1 rouble)
• два рубля▶ (2 roubles)
• пять рублей▶ (5 roubles)
• двадцать один рубль▶ (21 roubles: back to the singular, because it ends in 1)
• двадцать два рубля▶ (22 roubles)
• двадцать пять рублей▶ (25 roubles)

And the trap inside the trap: 11 to 14 do not follow their last digit. одиннадцать рублей▶ uses the пять form, not the один form. The teens are their own block.

Why you should not panic about this

Because here is what nobody tells you, and it is the most useful sentence in this article:

If you get the ending wrong, you will be understood perfectly.

Пять рубль is wrong. It is also completely clear. Nobody will misunderstand you, nobody will correct you, and the transaction will proceed. The endings carry almost no information here, because the number already told them everything.

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes people quit Russian. They meet this table in week one, decide the language is impossible, and stop. The people who actually learn Russian say пять рубль for a year, get understood every time, and the correct form settles in later from hearing it.

Say the number. Worry about the ending never.

Hundreds and thousands

двести▶ and триста▶ are irregular and worth learning as words. From 500 up it settles into digit + сот.

тысяча▶ is feminine, which is why it is две тысячи and not два тысячи. It is the one place the gender of a number word bites you early.

The billion trap

Good news, and it is rare: Russian and English agree.

Russia uses the short scale for the words that matter: a миллиард▶ is 10⁹, exactly the English billion, and a триллион▶ is 10¹², exactly the English trillion.

The only wrinkle: Russian prefers миллиард▶ where English says billion. The word биллион exists in Russian but is rare and ambiguous, and educated speakers avoid it. So:

English billion = миллиард▶. Use that, not биллион.

This puts Russian in the same camp as German, French and Spanish (which all use milliard / Milliarde / mil millones for 10⁹) while keeping the same value as English for trillion. If you are translating between English and Russian, the numbers line up. Between English and German, they do not.

Ordinals

They behave like adjectives, so they agree in gender: первый этаж▶ (first floor, masculine) but первая улица▶ (first street, feminine).

первый▶ and второй▶ are irregular. The rest are recognisably built from the cardinal.

Practical note: in a Russian building, первый этаж▶ is the ground floor, as in America and unlike Britain. Your second floor is their второй этаж▶, one flight up.

Fractions, decimals and money

Punctuation is European, not English:

• The comma is the decimal point: 3,14 is три целых четырнадцать▶.
• A space separates thousands: 1 500 is one and a half thousand.

So a price shown as 1 500 ₽ is fifteen hundred roubles.

Pronunciation: what the spelling hides

Stress moves, and it is never written. This is the real difficulty of Russian numbers, more than the endings.

Russian does not mark stress, and an unstressed о is pronounced a. So один▶ is a-DÍN, not "odin". сорок▶ is SÓ-rak, not "sorok".

You cannot deduce this from the page. It has to come through your ears, which is why the practice below is not optional advice.

Two sound traps in the numbers themselves:

• шестьдесят▶ (60) and семьдесят▶ (70) sound alarmingly similar at speed. Same problem as Spanish sesenta/setenta. This is the confusion that costs you money.
• The ь (soft sign) in пять▶, шесть▶, семь▶ is not decorative. It softens the consonant before it, and it is what makes пять sound like pyat rather than pyat-uh.

The numbers you'll use first

Forget counting to a hundred. This is your first hour:

Сколько стоит?▶ is the single most useful phrase in this article. Повторите, пожалуйста▶ is the second, because you will need it immediately after the first.

How this becomes automatic

Reading a table does nothing when the price arrives at full speed in a Moscow kiosk and your brain needs two seconds.

Numbers are where the gap between knowing and being able to say is most brutal, because they arrive fast and carry no context to help you guess.

Three things:

1. Out loud, and fast. Take сорок пять▶ and vary one element: сорок шесть, пятьдесят пять, сорок пять рублей. Build these variations into spaced repetition practice, and treat speed as the mechanism, not a bonus: slowly, your brain has time to route through English, and that detour is exactly what you want gone.
2. Through your ears, never off the page. Russian does not write its stress, so the page will actively teach you the wrong word. 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 are worth more than counting to a hundred.

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 with the stress in the right place, and you loop them until they arrive without translation. Available on iOS, Android, and Web.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Freezing over the noun endings. Get them wrong and you are still understood. This is the single biggest reason people quit Russian, and it is not worth quitting over.
2. Assuming 11 to 14 follow their last digit. They do not. The teens take the пять form.
3. Reading unstressed о as "o". один▶ is a-DÍN. The stress is not written, so the page lies to you.
4. Saying биллион for a billion. It is миллиард▶.
5. Saying два тысячи. тысяча▶ is feminine: две тысячи▶.
6. Confusing шестьдесят▶ and семьдесят▶. They sound alike at speed, and this one costs money.
7. Expecting первый этаж▶ to be one floor up. It is the ground floor.
8. Learning from transliteration. Cyrillic takes an afternoon and transliteration misrepresents the sounds.
9. Practising silently. Numbers arrive fast in real life. They train out loud or not at all.

Keep Reading

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