German numbers, prices, dates and times

Numbers: four rules build every one

You learn the first thirteen as words, the same way you did in English. After that, German is more regular than English, with one habit that trips everyone up: it says the unit before the ten.

1. 13 to 19 are unit + zehn.dreizehn, vierzehn. Two of them drop a letter:sechzehn, not sechszehn, andsiebzehn, not siebenzehn.
2. The tens end in -zig,except dreißig, written with ß. Twenty iszwanzig, not zweizig.
3. 21 to 99: unit, und, ten, all in one word.34 is vierunddreißig, four-and-thirty. One loses its -s inside a compound: einundzwanzig, never einsundzwanzig. When you listen, the small number comes first.
4. Hundreds and thousands join the same word.1.234 is tausendzweihundertvierunddreißig. One hundred and one thousand on their own are plainhundert and tausend; after a thousand the hundred keeps its ein:tausendeinhundert. A million is a noun and stands apart: eine Million, zwei Millionen.

On paper, Germany groups digits with a dot and marks decimals with a comma, the opposite of English: 1.234 is a thousand and something, 1,5 is one and a half.

Prices: a comma, the word Euro, and no plural

A price tag reads 12,50 €: comma before the cents, euro sign after the number. The cashier sayszwölf Euro fünfzig, and the wordCent is understood. Under a euro you say it:neunundneunzig Cent. Before the noun, one isein: ein Euro, the way the course's market scene has it, Hundert Gramm kosten ein Euro. Euro and Centstay singular in prices; you may hear Euros in the street, but you will not see it on a receipt.

Clock times: two clocks and one trap

Timetables, station announcements and appointment letters use the 24-hour clock and read the digits: vierzehn Uhr dreißig. People talking to each other use the 12-hour clock and a handful of phrases. One o'clock is ein Uhr, never eins Uhr. Use um for a time you meet,am for a part of the day, andvon … bis for a span, exactly as chapter 7 of the course lays them out.

The trap is halb. Halb achtmeans 7:30: half of the way to eight, not half past eight. Everything from twenty-five past onwards looks forward to the coming hour, so 7:45 is Viertel vor acht and 7:35 isfünf nach halb acht. For minutes with no phrase, such as 7:27, people simply read the digits on either clock.

Dates: the ending changes with the word in front

Germany writes the day first and puts a dot after it:3. Mai 2026, or 03.05.2026. That dot marks an ordinal, the third, and the ordinal takes an ending. Up to 19 the ending is -te, from 20 it is-ste, and four are irregular:erste, dritte, siebte, achte. Which ending you hear depends on the word before it. Naming the date, it isder dritte Mai. AnsweringWann?, it is am dritten Mai. At the top of a letter, after the town, it isBremen, den 3. Mai 2026, saidden dritten.

The months are Januar, Februar, März, April, Mai, Juni, Juli, August, September, Oktober, November, Dezember, all masculine and unchanged after am. Years from 1100 to 1999 are said in hundreds, neunzehnhundertneunundneunzig; from 2000 they are ordinary numbers,zweitausendsechsundzwanzig. You do not need the whole ordinal system for the exam. The course teachesam ersten Mai and your own birthday as fixed chunks, and that is enough to fill in a form, answer the examiner and date a letter.

Where this comes from

The German in this trainer is the German the course teaches, in the course's order: the numbers 0 to 12 in chapter 1, 13 to 1,000 and the market prices in chapter 2, the date chunk am dritten Mai in chapter 3, and clock times with um, halb and Viertel vor in chapter 7, whereIch stehe um sechs Uhr auf puts the time inside the verb bracket. In three places the trainer goes past what the course prints, using the standard forms: numbers above a thousand, spoken years, and the everyday minute phrases beyond the quarter and half hour. If you want the surrounding German, start with how to introduce yourself for your age and phone number, separable verbs for where a time goes in a sentence, and the letter templates for the date line every exam letter starts with.

What this tool is not

It does not speak yet, and it cannot hear you, so it will not tell you whether your dreißig sounded right. Say each figure out loud before you reveal it, then read the German aloud and compare. It produces standard German only: in the south and east you will also hear viertel acht for 7:15 anddreiviertel acht for 7:45, and people there will understand you perfectly well if you sayViertel nach sieben. It is not a translator and it handles nothing but whole numbers to 999,999,999, euro prices, clock times and dates.