It’s Professor Dave, let’s learn how to count in Italian.
To speak any language, you need to know how to use numbers.
Numbers are used to indicate dates and times, quantities of objects, and lots of other things,
so it’s crucial to at least have one through ten memorized, and ideally all the rest as well.
We don’t need any other context for this, so let’s dive right in.
Zero will be a cognate, zero.
Then going from there, we have:
These are the most important ones, so let’s say them again together, a bit more slowly.
From there we have:
From here to one hundred, it’s pretty easy.
We just need a new word for each multiple of ten, and the ones in between just use the
base word for that set of ten and then add the words for one through nine.
The only trick is that if the number coming after the base word starts with a vowel, like
with uno and otto, the last vowel of the base word will be dropped.
Starting with venti, we get: Ventuno.
From there, we repeat the same thing with trenta as the base word.
So that’s everything from one to a hundred.
After that it’s just what you would expect.
One hundred thirty four will be cento trentaquattro, which is just the words for one hundred, then
thirty, then four.
Two hundred is duecento, and so forth.
For a thousand we say mille, and multiples of that will be due mila, tre mila, and so on.
Million is milione, billion is miliardo, and that’s plenty big enough for our purposes.
Of course, all of these numbers can be used literally, just as you would any set of numbers.
Italians also use numbers figuratively, like Americans, so here are some fun bonus phrases.
And now we’ve got the Italian numbers down, so let’s check comprehension.