Counting to ten in French
One to ten, for prices, platforms, rooms and how many beers. Play the ten French words against the clock, with a note on how locals really use each one after every answer. All ten are written out below.
All 10 French phrases in this lesson
- Un / Uneuhn / OON
- One
- DeuxDUH
- Two
- TroisTRWAH
- Three
- QuatreKAT-ruh
- Four
- CinqSANK
- Five
- SixSEES
- Six
- SeptSET
- Seven
- HuitWEET
- Eight
- NeufNUF
- Nine
- DixDEES
- Ten
French has masculine (un) and feminine (une) forms. Un café, but une bière. The gender is part of the noun and worth learning with each word.
The final -re is barely there in speech; Parisians reduce it to "KAT." You will hear this everywhere, most often in quatre-vingts, the word for eighty.
Pronounce the final q in cinq when it stands alone. Before a consonant, it is often silent in casual speech.
The p is silent.
Also means new.
French counts normally to sixty and then does arithmetic out loud. Seventy is soixante-dix (sixty-ten), eighty is quatre-vingts (four-twenties), ninety is quatre-vingt-dix (four-twenties-ten), so ninety-seven is literally four-twenties-ten-seven. Belgium and Switzerland spare themselves with septante and nonante; France does not.
Where French is spoken
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