Module 4 of 10
Numbers twenty-one to a hundred
Three of these are arithmetic, and everyone finds them slow at first.
Up to sixty, French numbers behave. After that it does arithmetic out loud: seventy is sixty-ten, eighty is four-twenties, ninety is four-twenties-ten, and ninety-seven is four-twenties-seventeen. There is no trick and no shortcut, and the people who speak it do not find it strange, so the only useful response is to drill the four shapes — soixante-dix, quatre-vingts, quatre-vingt-dix, and the teens that ride on them — until they arrive as single words rather than as sums you are solving.
Hearing a number is much harder than saying one, because the person saying it is not pausing between the parts. Practise in the direction that is hard: play the phrases above in a random order with the screen covered and write down what you hear. A learner who can say quatre-vingt-quinze perfectly and cannot catch it when a receptionist says it has practised the easy half. And if you are told a price or a room number you did not catch, you already have the repair phrase from Foundation — use it rather than nodding.
Played by your device’s own French voice. It is a synthetic voice, not a recording of a teacher — close enough to learn the shape of a word, not close enough to copy exactly.
- Vingt-et-unTwenty-one
- TrenteThirty
- QuaranteForty
- CinquanteFifty
- SoixanteSixty
- Soixante-dixSeventy — literally sixty-ten
- Quatre-vingtsEighty — literally four-twenties
- Quatre-vingt-dixNinety — four-twenties-ten
- CentA hundred
Seventy, eighty and ninety are arithmetic said out loud. Drill hearing them, not just saying them.