German Numbers 1 to 100: A Complete Guide

Why German numbers are more logical than they look

Before you learn a single word, it helps to know the good news: German numbers are built from a tiny set of parts, and once you have those parts you can assemble almost any number without learning it separately. There is no long list of special words for every value. You learn the digits, a handful of patterns for the teens and the tens, one joining word, and the rules for stacking hundreds and thousands. That is nearly the whole system.

English is actually messier than German in places. Think about how English has eleven and twelve, which look nothing like one and two, then thirteen, then a jump to twenty, thirty, and so on. German has its own quirks, but the underlying logic is remarkably tidy. Almost every number is spelled as one single word, with all the parts glued together, so a value like 347 becomes one long chain of syllables rather than three separate words. It looks strange at first and then it starts to feel almost mathematical.

There are really only two things about German numbers that give learners trouble, and both are covered in detail below. The first is the order: from twenty-one onward, German states the ones digit before the tens, so you say the equivalent of one-and-twenty. The second is that these numbers are written as one word, which makes a value like 95 look like a wall of letters until you learn to break it into pieces. Master those two ideas and the rest is mostly memorizing a small starter set and applying patterns.

So the plan for this guide is simple. Get the numbers 0 to 12 solid as individual words, because those are the raw material. Learn the teens and the tens as patterns rather than as separate items. Understand the one-and-twenty order and drill it until it feels natural. Then stack on hundreds, thousands, and millions, add the ordinals, and finish with practice that puts real numbers in your mouth. If you are also just starting with the writing system, our guide to the German alphabet, its sounds and umlauts pairs well with this one, because knowing the letters makes the spelling below far less intimidating.

German numbers 0 to 20

Here is the core set. Numbers 0 to 12 are individual words you simply have to learn, and they are worth learning cold, because everything else is built from them or from patterns you will meet in a moment. The rough pronunciation in the last column is written the way an English speaker would sound it out. It is not a precise phonetic system, just a friendly nudge toward the right sound, and the section right after this table explains the real rules.

Look closely at that list and you can already see the machinery. The numbers 13 to 19 are mostly just the digit plus zehn, the word for ten. Thirteen is drei plus zehn, dreizehn. Fourteen is vier plus zehn, vierzehn. Nineteen is neun plus zehn, neunzehn. It is the same idea as the English -teen ending, just with zehn doing the job. Two of the teens change slightly, sixteen and seventeen, and we will come back to why in the section on the teens.

The two numbers that do not follow a pattern are eleven and twelve, elf and zwölf. Just as English has its own odd pair for these, German does too, and you have to learn them as one-off words. The good thing is there are only two of them, and you will use them constantly, so they stick fast. Say elf and zwölf out loud a few times right now and they will not give you trouble again.

How to pronounce them: the sound rules

German pronunciation is far more consistent than English, because the letters almost always make the same sound. Once you learn a handful of rules, you can read a number you have never seen and say it correctly. These same rules power the whole language, so this is time very well spent, and they line up neatly with the sounds covered in our full German alphabet guide.

Here are the sound rules that matter most for numbers:

• z is a "ts" sound. The z in zwei, zehn, and zwanzig is not the soft z of the English "zoo." It is a sharp ts, like the end of the word "cats." So zehn is "tsayn," not "zen."
• w sounds like English v. The w in zwei and zwanzig sounds like a v, so zwei is "tsvy." German has no English-style w sound at all.
• v sounds like English f. This one surprises people. The v in vier and vierzig is an f sound, so vier is "feer" and vierzig is "FEER-tsikh."
• ei is said "eye," and ie is said "ee." The pair ei rhymes with "eye," so drei is "dry" and eins is "eyns." The pair ie is a long ee, so sieben starts like "zee." Keep these two straight, because they are opposites and easy to mix up.
• eu is an "oy" sound. The eu in neun sounds like the oy in "boy," so neun is "noyn."
• ü and ö are the umlaut vowels. The ü in fünf has no English match. Round your lips as if to say "oo" but try to say "ee." The ö in zwölf works the same way: round your lips for "oh" and say "eh." These take practice, and getting them roughly right is fine at the start.
• ch is that soft throat sound. The ch in acht and sechs is made in the back of the mouth, a little like clearing your throat gently. It is not a hard k, though "ahkht" for acht gets you close enough to be understood.
• Final -ig often softens to "ikh." In many regions the -ig ending on zwanzig, dreissig, and the other tens is pronounced like a soft "ikh" rather than a hard "ig." Both are understood everywhere, so do not stress about it, but "TSVAHN-tsikh" is the more standard version.

Notice how much of the number system runs on just a few of these. The ts sound of z shows up in almost every number because of zwei, zehn, and the -zig ending. The umlaut vowels appear in fünf and zwölf and then again all through fünfzehn and fünfzig. Get comfortable with these sounds early and dozens of numbers fall into place at once. If the umlauts feel impossible right now, that is completely normal, and our guide on how to improve your pronunciation in a foreign language has drills that make these unfamiliar sounds much easier over a couple of weeks.

The teens and why they feel backwards

The teens, 13 through 19, are the friendliest part of the whole system, because they are built the way English speakers expect: the small digit comes first, then the word for ten. This is the one place where German keeps the order you are used to, so enjoy it while it lasts, because the numbers just above will flip that order on its head.

The pattern is digit plus zehn:

• 13 is drei plus zehn, giving dreizehn.
• 14 is vier plus zehn, giving vierzehn.
• 15 is fünf plus zehn, giving fünfzehn.
• 18 is acht plus zehn, giving achtzehn.
• 19 is neun plus zehn, giving neunzehn.

Two of the teens shave off a sound to make them easier to say, and they are worth noticing so the spelling does not surprise you. Sixteen drops the s from sechs, so instead of "sechszehn" you get sechzehn. Seventeen drops the -en from sieben, so instead of "siebenzehn" you get siebzehn. Say those two versions out loud and you can feel why: the full forms are a mouthful, and German trims them for flow. This exact trimming shows up again in the tens, so it is a pattern, not a random exception.

Now for the twist that everyone warns you about. Starting at twenty-one, German reverses the order of the digits within a two-digit number. It says the ones digit first, then the word and, then the tens. So twenty-one is not "twenty-one" but the equivalent of "one-and-twenty." This does not affect the teens themselves, which stay in the friendly order, but it governs everything from 21 to 99, so it is worth meeting the idea now before the next section makes it concrete.

Here is the thing to hold onto: this order feels foreign, but it is not illogical, and it is perfectly regular. English used to do exactly the same thing. The old nursery rhyme about "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" is counting the German way, four-and-twenty rather than twenty-four. German simply kept that older pattern while English mostly dropped it. Once you stop fighting it and start hearing one-and-twenty as a single unit, it stops being a hurdle.

The tens: 20, 30, and the eszett

The tens are the multiples of ten from twenty to ninety, and almost all of them follow one clean pattern: the digit plus the ending -zig. Learn that ending and you can predict most of them on sight. There is exactly one exception, thirty, and it is famous enough to have its own little reputation among learners.

Twenty, zwanzig, is slightly its own creature. You might expect "zweizig" from zwei, but it is zwanzig, an older form worth learning as a single word. After that the pattern is dependable: vierzig, fünfzig, achtzig, and neunzig are just the digit with -zig stuck on the end. Notice that sixty and seventy do the same trimming you saw in the teens. Sixty is sechzig, with sechs losing its s, and seventy is siebzig, with sieben losing its -en. The same sounds that were awkward in sechzehn and siebzehn get trimmed here for exactly the same reason.

Then there is thirty, the odd one out. Every other ten ends in -zig, but thirty ends in -ßig, spelled dreißig with the eszett. The eszett, written ß, is a special German letter that stands for a sharp double-s sound. So while the other tens have that "ts" of the z, thirty has a hissing "ss" instead: "DRY-sikh," not "DRY-tsikh." There is no clever rule to derive this from. Thirty is simply spelled and said differently, and you learn dreißig as a one-off. It is genuinely the only exception in the tens, so once you have it, the rest are smooth.

The eszett is worth a word on its own, because it also appears in other common German words and it confuses newcomers. It is not a capital B, even though it looks a little like one. It is a letter that represents "ss," it only ever appears in the middle or at the end of words, never at the start, and in Switzerland it is often written out as a plain "ss" instead. When you type it and cannot find the key, writing "dreissig" with a double s is a perfectly acceptable substitute that every German reader understands. You can read more about how ß fits with the umlauts in the German alphabet guide.

The compound numbers: one-and-twenty

Now we reach the part that defines German numbers in most people's minds: the compound numbers from 21 to 99. This is where the ones digit comes first, joined to the tens by und, the word for and, all written as a single word. Twenty-one is einundzwanzig, which reads literally as one-and-twenty. It looks like a lot, and then you see the pattern and it clicks.

The formula never changes. Take the ones digit, add und, add the tens, and run them together: ones + und + tens. So:

• 21 is ein + und + zwanzig, giving einundzwanzig (one-and-twenty).
• 22 is zwei + und + zwanzig, giving zweiundzwanzig (two-and-twenty).
• 34 is vier + und + dreißig, giving vierunddreißig (four-and-thirty).
• 45 is fünf + und + vierzig, giving fünfundvierzig (five-and-forty).
• 67 is sieben + und + sechzig, giving siebenundsechzig (seven-and-sixty).
• 99 is neun + und + neunzig, giving neunundneunzig (nine-and-ninety).

There is one small spelling detail in that list. When one is the ones digit, it appears as ein, not eins. Standing alone, the number one is eins, but inside a compound it drops the final s, so twenty-one is einundzwanzig and not "einsundzwanzig." This is the same ein you meet as the word for "a" or "an," and it shows up in every compound ending in one: thirty-one is einunddreißig, forty-one is einundvierzig, and so on.

Here is a fuller table so you can see the machine running across a whole decade. Watch how only the first part changes while und and the tens stay put.

The reason this order trips people up is not the logic, which is simple, but the timing. When a number is coming at you in speech, your brain hears the ones digit first and wants to write it in the ones place, then has to hold it and swap once the tens arrive. Hearing "fünfundvierzig" you get "five" first, but the answer is forty-five, so the five belongs at the end. This gets much easier with practice, and the trick is to stop translating each part and start hearing the whole word as the value. Drill them out loud enough and einundzwanzig simply means 21 to you, with no reshuffling required.

One practical note about the number two in real life. On the phone, and when reading out account numbers or addresses, Germans often say zwo instead of zwei for the number two. This is done on purpose, to avoid confusion between zwei and drei, which can sound similar over a crackly line. You do not need to use zwo yourself, but do not be thrown when you hear it, because it means exactly the same thing as zwei.

Hundreds: hundert

Once you can count to 99, the hundreds open up with almost no new effort, because you only need one new word: hundert, meaning hundred. You put the digit in front of it, and, as always in German, you write the whole thing as a single word. One hundred is simply hundert, or einhundert if you want to be explicit about the one, and both are correct.

The multiples of a hundred are the digit plus hundert:

To say a full three-digit number, you read the hundreds part and then attach the last two digits in their usual German order, one-and-twenty style. So 121 is hundert plus einundzwanzig, written hunderteinundzwanzig, which is "one hundred one-and-twenty." A number like 345 is dreihundert plus fünfundvierzig, giving dreihundertfünfundvierzig. Yes, it becomes one very long word, but it is still just the parts you already know, snapped together in order: hundreds, then ones, then und, then tens.

It helps to break these giants apart when you read them. Take dreihundertfünfundvierzig and split it in your mind: dreihundert is 300, fünfundvierzig is 45, so the whole thing is 345. Reading German numbers is often just a matter of finding the seams, the points where hundert and und divide the word into chunks you recognize. With a little practice your eye starts to see those seams automatically, and the long words stop being walls.

One more small thing to notice: there is no word for "and" between the hundreds and the rest, unlike English, where some speakers say "one hundred and twenty-one." German goes straight from hundert into the tens-and-ones with no extra joining word. The only und you will hear is the one built into the compound, the one-and-twenty und. Keep that straight and your hundreds will come out clean.

Thousands, millions, and a big false friend

Thousands work exactly like hundreds, with one new word: tausend, meaning thousand. One thousand is tausend or eintausend, two thousand is zweitausend, and so on. To build a full number you stack the parts in descending order, thousands then hundreds then the tens-and-ones, all as one word. It gets long, but the logic never changes.

Take a real example. The year 1985, when read as a plain number, is eintausendneunhundertfünfundachtzig: eintausend for 1000, neunhundert for 900, and fünfundachtzig for 85. Break it at the seams, at tausend and hundert and und, and it decodes cleanly. Years are often said a special way in German, more on that in a moment, but as a raw number that is how 1985 is built.

For very large numbers, German uses these words:

Two things change once you reach a million. First, Million and Milliarde are treated as nouns: they are capitalized, they take eine for "one," and they have plural forms, Millionen and Milliarden. So two million is zwei Millionen, written as separate words rather than glued on. Second, and this is the trap worth circling in red, the German Billion does not mean an English billion. A German Billion is a million millions, which English calls a trillion. What English calls a billion, a thousand millions, German calls a Milliarde. If you ever discuss large sums of money in German, this false friend can throw your numbers off by a factor of a thousand, so it is genuinely worth remembering.

A couple of writing conventions round this out. German uses a comma where English uses a decimal point, so a price like 3.5 is written 3,5 and read drei Komma fünf, meaning "three comma five." And for grouping large numbers, German uses a period or a thin space where English uses a comma, so one thousand is often written 1.000. It looks like a decimal to an English eye, but it is just the thousands separator. Keep these two conventions in mind and German prices and statistics will stop looking mistyped.

Ordinal numbers: erste, zweite, dritte

Everything so far has been cardinal numbers, the ones you count with: one, two, three. Ordinal numbers tell position instead: first, second, third. You need them for dates, floors of a building, rankings, and anything with an order, so they matter a lot in daily life. In German the ordinals are built from the cardinals with a predictable ending, plus a few irregulars to memorize.

The basic rule has two halves:

• From 2 to 19, add -te to the number. Fourth is vier plus -te, vierte. Sixth is sech plus -ste, actually sechste. Nineteenth is neunzehn plus -te, neunzehnte.
• From 20 upward, add -ste to the number. Twentieth is zwanzig plus -ste, zwanzigste. Hundredth is hundert plus -ste, hundertste.

A handful of ordinals are irregular and simply have to be learned, because they do not follow the tidy pattern. They are also the ones you will use most, so they earn their keep quickly.

Here is the part that catches learners off guard: ordinals are adjectives, so they change their ending to match the noun they describe, the same way German adjectives do generally. The forms in the table above end in -e, which is what you use in many common situations, for example der erste Tag, meaning the first day. But depending on the gender, the case, and whether there is a der or ein in front, that ending can shift to -er, -en, or -es. You will see der erste, ein erster, am ersten, and so on. This is a whole grammar topic in itself, and at the start it is fine to learn the base -e forms and pick up the endings as you meet real sentences.

Two everyday uses are worth knowing right away. In writing, German marks an ordinal with a period after the digit, so "the first of May" is written 1. Mai and read der erste Mai. That little period is doing the job of the English -st, -nd, or -th. And when you say a date, you generally use the ordinal, so the third of October is der dritte Oktober. Getting comfortable saying dates out loud is one of the fastest ways to make the ordinals automatic, because you use them constantly.

Numbers in everyday German

Numbers only become real when you use them for something, so here is how they show up in the situations you will actually meet. Practicing them in context, rather than as a bare list, is what moves them from a chart you can recite into words that arrive when you need them.

Telling the time. The clock is one of the most common places numbers appear. Es ist drei Uhr means "it is three o'clock." For minutes, Germans often build times around the half hour in a way that surprises English speakers: halb drei does not mean half past three, it means half past two, literally "half three," as in halfway to three. That one is worth drilling on its own, because guessing wrong about halb can make you an hour off. Simple clock times, though, are just the number plus Uhr, so seven o'clock is sieben Uhr.

Prices and shopping. A price like 4,99 euro is read vier Euro neunundneunzig, with the euros and the cents said as two numbers around the currency word. Remember the comma is the decimal marker, so 4,99 is four euros and ninety-nine cents. When you shop, hearing the total said back to you fast is often the hardest part, which is exactly why practicing prices out loud pays off so quickly.

Phone numbers. These are commonly read as individual digits or in small pairs, and this is where you will hear zwo for two, to keep it distinct from drei. Reading your own phone number aloud in German is a great daily micro-drill, because it forces you through a random string of digits with no pattern to lean on.

Years. For years up to 1999, German traditionally reads them in hundreds, so 1985 is neunzehnhundertfünfundachtzig, literally "nineteen hundred five-and-eighty." From 2000 onward, years are usually read as plain numbers, so 2026 is zweitausendsechsundzwanzig. Both patterns are common, and you will hear the hundreds style constantly for twentieth-century dates.

Age, quantities, and counting things. Saying how old you are, how many siblings you have, how many coffees you want, all of it runs on the cardinal numbers you have already learned. Ich bin dreissig means "I am thirty." Zwei Kaffee, bitte means "two coffees, please." The more you fold numbers into these tiny everyday sentences, the faster they stop feeling like a separate subject and start feeling like ordinary words. Learning them alongside a core set of nouns and phrases from our list of common German words to learn first makes the whole thing click faster, because you have real things to count.

How to practice numbers out loud

You can memorize this entire page and still freeze when a cashier rattles off a total, because reading numbers and producing them at conversational speed are two different skills. The gap is the same one that trips up every part of language learning: recognizing something on paper is far easier than pulling it out of your own mouth in real time. Numbers make this gap especially obvious, because they arrive fast and there is a right answer, so you cannot fudge your way through.

The fix is to practice numbers the way you will actually use them, out loud and against the clock. A few drills that work well:

• Count out loud daily. Run from 1 to 20 forwards, then backwards, then count up by tens: zehn, zwanzig, dreißig, and on to hundert. Backwards and by-tens counting breaks the habit of only knowing the sequence in one direction, which is how numbers actually come at you in life.
• Say every number you see. House numbers, license plates, prices, the clock, the page you are on. Whenever a number crosses your vision, say it in German under your breath. This turns your whole day into free practice and costs no extra time.
• Read your phone number and today's date aloud. Both force you through numbers with real structure, digits for the phone, ordinals and months for the date, and both are things you know cold in English, so all your effort goes into the German.
• Do quick mental math in German. Say small sums out loud: zwei plus drei ist fünf. It keeps you nimble with the words rather than just reciting a fixed list.
• Practice hearing them, not just saying them. The one-and-twenty order is hardest to decode when someone else says it fast. You need to train your ear to catch fünfundvierzig and land on 45 without pausing, and the only way to build that is to listen to numbers spoken and answer back.

That last point is the one you cannot really do alone. You can count out loud in the shower all you like, but you will never surprise yourself, and real number practice is about being surprised, hearing a value you did not choose and having to react. That is why a conversation partner matters so much for numbers specifically. Someone, or something, has to throw numbers at you at natural speed and let you struggle to catch them, then tell you when you got it wrong.

This is also where saying the numbers out loud, not just thinking them, does double duty. Producing the sounds trains your mouth to make the German ts and the umlaut vowels, and it wires the value to the spoken word rather than the written one. If you only ever recognize numbers silently, you build a quiet, passive knowledge that collapses the moment you have to speak. Say them, every time, even when you are practicing alone.

How SPAIKING helps you say numbers for real

Numbers are the clearest example of the difference between studying a language and speaking it. You can learn every word on this page in an afternoon and still panic when a German waiter says your total out loud, because that moment demands instant listening and instant production, not recognition. Closing that gap takes practice against a live partner who speaks numbers at you and expects an answer, and that is exactly what SPAIKING is built to give you.

Here is how it fits with everything above. After you have the tables in your head, you open SPAIKING and actually talk, ordering food and getting a price back, arranging a time and hearing halb drei, giving your age, working through a phone number. Because the AI responds in real time, you get the two-way pressure a chart on a page can never create: a number you did not choose, coming at conversational speed, that you have to catch and reply to. That pressure is precisely what turns einundzwanzig from something you decode into something you simply know means 21.

The parts that make it work for numbers specifically:

• It says numbers at you, not just for you. You have to listen and decode the backwards order live, which is the exact skill a silent flashcard can never train.
• It corrects your pronunciation as you go. Your own ear forgives your soft z and your rough ü, so you never hear the mistake. Live feedback tells you the truth and points you at what to fix.
• It is always available and never impatient. You can fumble fünfundvierzig ten times in a row and it just keeps going, which is what finally gets nervous learners to produce numbers out loud instead of hiding in more reading.
• It puts numbers in real context. Prices, times, and dates come inside actual sentences, so you practice them the way they truly show up rather than as an isolated list.

Think of this guide as the first half and speaking as the second. The tables and rules give you the material, the parts you can study anywhere. Saying them out loud with a partner who answers back is the half that actually makes you able to use numbers when it counts, at a counter, on the phone, buying a train ticket with a clock ticking. Put the two together, learn the patterns here and then drill them out loud in real conversation, and German numbers stop being the thing you dread and become one of the parts you are quietly confident about. You can start on the pricing page, or head back to the SPAIKING home page to see how the speaking practice works.