Zahlen 0-10

The numbers from zero to ten are the building blocks of every German number, and several of them look like their English cousins: drei and three, acht and eight, neun and nine.

Pronunciation traps

Zwei and zehn start with "ts", not "z": "tsvy", "tsayn". Vier starts with an f-sound, like "fear". Sechs sounds like "zecks", and neun rhymes with "coin" with an n in front. In fünf, round your lips for the ü; "funf" is the English-speaker version Germans notice at once.

zwei or zwo?

On the phone, at a train station or in the army you will hear zwo instead of zwei. It exists because zwei and drei are easy to confuse on a bad line. Deutsche Bahn announcements say Gleis zwo (platform two), and a Berliner might read out a phone number as null-drei-null, zwo-fünf-sieben.

eins, ein, eine

When you count or give a number on its own, you say eins: eins, zwei, drei; Wie viele Brötchen? - Eins. Referring back to a noun, the number follows the noun's gender: Wie viele Brezeln? - Eine. Before a noun, "one" turns into the article ein or eine, depending on the noun's gender: ein Brötchen, eine Brezel. English uses "a" and "one" for two different jobs; German uses one word for both, so Ich habe ein Kind can mean "a child" or "one child". Stress ein to make it "one".