Numbers 11 and up

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Numbers 11 and up: build them, read them aloud

You met the numbers up to a hundred in “Numbers, time & days”, and in “Cardinals 1–10” you saw how the noun changes after 1, after 2–4 and after 5. Now for the rest: the teens with -naest, the round tens, the hundreds, thousands and millions, and, more to the point, how to read with them: a price in a shop, a year on a document, a phone number. The good news is that Serbian counting is remarkably transparent, more regular than English. Where English says -teen and -ty, Serbian says -naest and -deset: both languages hide the word “ten” at the end, just in different clothes.

This is a practice lesson, and there is little grammar in it. The last word of a number still decides the form of the noun, by the same three steps: sto dvadeset jedan dinar, sto dvadeset dva dinara, sto dvadeset pet dinara; the teens behave like five (petnaest dinara). The details belong to “Agreement with 2–4” and “Agreement with 5 and up”. The aim here is simpler and more down to earth: recognise a big number on a price tag and say it aloud without stumbling.

The teens: 11–19 and -naest

The numbers from 11 to 19 are a unit plus -naest, which does the job of English -teen: jedanaest “eleven”, petnaest “fifteen”. Say -naest as two syllables, na-est, with both vowels pure and separate, never merged into one sound: jedanaest is ye-da-na-est. A few forms shrink where the pieces join; simply learn them by sight:

Three spelling traps. šesnaest (16) loses the t of šest, and četrnaest (14) squeezes četiri down to četr-. English knows the habit: four but forty, not “fourty”. In četrnaest the r carries a syllable of its own, as in the lesson “Syllabic r”: če-tr-na-est. And in jedanaest (11) the two n’s of jedan + -naest merge into one. The other six are built honestly: the unit plus -naest.

Tens and compound numbers

The round tens are made with the suffix -deset (from deset “ten”), much as English uses -ty. Four of them are spelled differently from what you would get by building them head-on:

Cheat sheet

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Numbers 11 and up

Three building blocks: the teens 11–19 in -naest (like -teen), the round tens in -deset (like -ty), and the big units sto, hiljada, milion. A long number is separate words, largest to smallest, normally with no “and” and no hyphens. The last word of the number decides the noun: dvadeset jedan dinar, dvadeset dva dinara, dvadeset pet dinara; 11–19 go like 5 (petnaest dinara).

Teens 11–19: -naest

Round tens: -deset

Hundreds, thousands, millions

Reading aloud: price, year, phone