Numbers are a must-know when learning a language because they’re used in so many situations -- figuring out what time it is, how much something costs, understanding the timeline that your tour guide is talking about, doing math, understanding recipes, and even interpreting the WiFi password.

Italian Cardinal Numbers From 1 to 100

You can use the following table to memorize numbers from 1 to 100.

The numbers venti, trenta, quaranta, cinquanta, and so on drop the final vowel when combined with uno - 1 and otto - 8. Tre - 3 is written without an accent, but ventitré - 23, trentatré - 33, and so on are written with an acute accent.

Also, notice that once you know the base number, like “venti - 20”, you can add your numbers for 1-10 to create “ventuno - 21”, “ventidue - 22”, “ventitré - 23” and so on.

Esempi:

A: Quanto costa la focaccia? - How much does the focaccia cost?

B: Costa due euro e cinquanta centesimi. - It costs 2,50 euro.

A: Fa caldo oggi! Quanti gradi ci sono? - It’s hot today! What’s the temperature?

B: Trentuno gradi! - 31 degrees!

A: Che ore sono? - What time is it?

B: Sono le due e undici. - It’s 2:11.

Italian Cardinal Numbers of 100 and Greater

Back in the old days, before the euro's arrival in Italy, you could pay a few thousand lire for admission to a museum or for a cappuccino and biscotti. During that time, tourists needed to know more than just the numbers up to 100 to get around.

Lucky for you, lire are history, but learning numbers greater than 100 will still prove useful, particularly when talking about years or the prices for any couture items.

• 1492 - millequattrocentonovantadue
• 1962 - millenovecentosessantadue
• 1991 - millenovecentonovantuno
• 2000 - duemila
• 2016 - duemila sedici

Italian Ordinal Numbers

You can place items in 'order' with ordinal numbers.

For instance, il primo is the first course on a menu and il secondo is the second course, so pay attention to articles.

Here’s what they look like:

When used with the numerical succession of kings, popes, and emperors, the ordinal numbers are capitalized. For example, Vittorio Emanuele III (Terzo), who ruled the unified Italian nation from 1900 to 1946, was the third king with that name.

Some other examples are:

• Pope Paul Quinto - Pope Paul V
• Vittorio Emanuele Secondo - Vittorio Emanuele II
• Leone Nono - Leone IX
• Carlo Quinto - Carlo V

Here are some examples of centuries:

• diciottesimo secolo - eighteenth century
• diciannovesimo secolo - nineteenth century
• ventesimo secolo - twentieth century

Notice the regularity of ordinal numbers beginning with undicesimo. The suffix -esimo is added to the cardinal numbers by dropping the final vowel of the cardinal number.

The one exception includes numbers ending in -tré.

Those numbers drop their accent and are unchanged when -esimo is added.

Since Italian ordinal numbers function as adjectives, they must agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify: primo, prima, primi, prime.

• Il primo ministro - The Prime Minister
• Il primo sindaco donna della storia di questa città - The first female major in the history of this city
• Prendiamo il primo treno che arriva! - Let’s catch the first train coming!
• La prima della fila è questa signora, io sono la seconda. - The first in line ​is this lady, I’m the second one.

NUMBER: THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

If there is a universal human language, it's the language of numbers. So intuitive and uniform is the idea of numbers, that it is easy to learn and understand them even when spoken in another language. In fact, in most foreign language classes, the 'number words' are some of the first things you learn.

The following table goes over the important word components used to form number words in English, but also in 13 additional languages , including Latin, Greek, Japanese, Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, and many more!

There is also a bonus language not shown on this chart, but there is a link that will take you to it after the chart.

Please note that Greek does not use the standard English alphabet, but rather the Greek alphabet which only contains 24 letters. Some of these letters are analogous to English letters, but others have no counterpart. The Greek number words here are the result of translating Greek letters to approximate English letters based on phonetics (the way the Greek letters are pronounced ). This same approach ( called 'transliteration' ) has been used on the Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swahili , Sanskrit, and Thai languages.

The following two tables display all the word components you would need to count to a thousand in no less than 14 different languages. These will come in handy later as you will see, for naming large numbers. Here's the first 7 languages:

Here is an additional 7 languages:

There is also urdu which is very unusual. I would have listed it with the other languages, but the construction for the first 100 counting numbers is irregular and doesn't follow the constructions above. If your interested you can learn about urdu numbers at this link ... Urdu numbers .

Now that I have given a sampling of the notations and naming conventions used for numbers throughout the world and through history, I would like to present my own unique naming convention.

The next article explains the impetus for this construction. Basically it provides short names for the first 1000 or so counting numbers !