French Numbers

Learning French feels much like being back in Kindergarten. We learned the alphabet- same letters as the English, in the same order, but different pronunciations. It was funny to have our class of adults saying the alphabet together, over and over.
We also learned the days of the weeks, months of the year, and other things that reminded me of the things that you would learn in Kindergarten (or pre-school.) One of the things we learned was numbers. We started with the numbers 1-31 so that we could do dates. Then a few weeks later, we learned the rest of the numbers up to 100.
The numbers are similar to ours at the beginning...
1-un
2-deux
3-trois
etc, etc,

But some of the higher numbers are a little different. The word for 60 is soixante. When you get to seventy, instead of a seperate word, you say soixante-dix (60-10) then you keep going
soixante et onze (60 and 11)
soixante et douze (60-12)
soixante et treize (60-13)

When you get to 80 it is quatre-vingts (4-20s)...
quatre-vingt-un (4-20-1)
quatre-vingt-deux (4-20-2)

As you get higher and higher, the numbers get longer. You end up with
99-quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (4-20-10-9)

This makes sense if you think about it- four twenties plus ten plus nine is ninety nine. It just takes a little getting used to! The first few days after we learned the numbers, we took turns counting in class... Anna, you count from 51-60, then David, you count from 61-70, and so on, until everyone had a turn. It was quite amuzing!