Learning how to count in Catalan is an essential first step for any beginner.

You’ll need to use numbers every day when buying groceries, reading the time, or exchanging phone numbers.

The Catalan number system is highly logical and very similar to other Romance languages.

Once you memorize a few basic patterns, you can easily count all the way to one million.

This guide will show you exactly how to form numbers in Catalan.

Numbers from 0 to 10

We’ll start with the most basic building blocks of the Catalan counting system.

These are the numbers you’ll use constantly in daily life.

You simply need to memorize these by heart.

Notice that the numbers 1 and 2 change depending on the gender of the noun they describe.

You use un and dos for masculine nouns.

You use una and dues for feminine nouns.

In the Valencian region, you’ll hear people say huit instead of vuit for the number eight.

Valencian and Balearic speakers also commonly use dos for both masculine and feminine nouns.

Numbers from 11 to 19

The numbers from 11 to 15 have unique names that end in -ze.

You’ll notice they sound quite similar to Spanish or French numbers.

For numbers 16 to 19, the pattern changes slightly.

Catalan combines the word for ten (deu) with the single digits.

Note that 16 (setze) still follows the -ze ending pattern.

In Valencian, 17 is spelled and pronounced dèsset.

Valencian speakers also write and pronounce 18 as dihuit instead of divuit.

Counting from 20 to 99

To count past twenty, you first need to learn the base words for the tens.

These all end in -anta, except for the number twenty.

When you combine these tens with single digits, Catalan uses a specific hyphen rule.

This spelling rule is commonly known as the D-U-C rule.

You must place a hyphen between tens and units.

You also place a hyphen between units and hundreds.

For the twenties, you also need to add an i (and) between the tens and units.

Let’s look at the twenties in action.

For all other tens from thirty onwards, you just use a hyphen without the i.

Here’s a quick dialogue showing how you might use these numbers to state your age.

Hundreds and thousands

Counting in the hundreds is very straightforward in Catalan.

The word for one hundred is cent.

When counting multiple hundreds, you simply attach the plural word -cents (or -centes for feminine) to the unit using a hyphen.

Remember that D-U-C hyphen rule we mentioned earlier.

You place a hyphen between the unit and the hundred.

If you add tens and units to a hundred, you don’t place a hyphen directly after the hundred word.

Let’s look at an example to make this spelling clear.

The number 345 is written as tres-cents quaranta-cinc.

For thousands, the Catalan word is mil.

Unlike the hundreds, mil doesn’t take a hyphen and doesn’t change for plural or gender nouns.

Here’s how you might hear a price spoken in a store.

Ordinal numbers in Catalan

Ordinal numbers tell you the position of something in a list.

You use these for the floors of a building or finishing places in a race.

Ordinal numbers must agree in gender and number with the noun they modify.

Here are the masculine singular forms for the first ten ordinal numbers.

To make these feminine, you’ll adjust the ending of the word.

For example, primer becomes primera, and segon becomes segona.

For words ending in an accented -è, you drop the accent and add -ena.

This means that cinquè becomes cinquena in its feminine form.