Numbers and the case that follows

Russian numbers take an afternoon to learn as a list. Using them takes longer, because every Russian number decides the case of the noun that follows it, and it decides differently depending on how many there are. Одна́ кни́га, две кни́ги, пять книг: one book, two books, five books, and three different forms of the word for book.

The rule is three groups, and once you have them it never changes: one agrees with the noun like an adjective, two to four take the genitive singular, five and up take the genitive plural. Everything below is those three groups, plus the list itself. Cardinal numbers are on the Pearson Edexcel GCSE Russian specification at both Foundation and Higher tier.

Russian numbers 1-20

Stress is not marked in ordinary Russian, so it is marked here in the transliteration, with an accent on the stressed vowel. Learn it with the number. A number said with the stress in the wrong place is still understood, but it is the quickest tell that you learned from a page.

Zero, ноль, is a noun rather than a number, and whatever it counts goes into the genitive plural: ноль гра́дусов, zero degrees. It has an older twin, нуль, and that is where the fixed phrase с нуля́, from scratch, comes from; the genitive of ноль itself is ноля.

The teens are built the same way every time: the unit, then -надцать, a worn-down on ten. The spelling has three small traps:

• the soft sign of five to nine drops out: пятна́дцать, not пятьнадцать;
• two becomes две- in двена́дцать;
• four loses its last vowel in четы́рнадцать.

The stress does not follow the pattern. It sits on the -на- in most of them and moves forward in eleven and fourteen, and the only way to get it right is to have heard it.

The tens, hundreds and thousands

The tens come in three patterns. Twenty and thirty are two and three plus -дцать, the same worn-down ten as the teens. Fifty to eighty are the unit plus -десят, and here the unit keeps its soft sign in the middle of the word: пятьдеся́т, шестьдеся́т, се́мьдесят, во́семьдесят. Watch the stress in the table: it falls at the end of fifty and sixty but at the start of seventy and eighty.

Then two misfits: forty is со́рок, possibly from an old word for a bundle of forty pelts, and ninety is девяно́сто, not the девятьдесят the pattern would predict. Everything else is assembled from parts you already have.

Bigger numbers are written as they are said, largest first, with no and: два́дцать оди́н is twenty-one, сто два́дцать пять is 125. There is nothing to learn about assembly beyond the words themselves.

One: an adjective in disguise

Оди́н agrees with its noun in gender, exactly as an adjective does, and the noun stays in the nominative:

That last row looks like a joke and is not. Some Russian nouns exist only in the plural, часы́ (a clock or a watch) and де́ньги (money) among them, and одни́ is the form that counts one of them.

In most sentences Russian leaves оди́н out altogether. У меня́ есть брат already means I have a brother; there is no article to supply, so the number appears only when the one-ness itself matters.

Two, three and four: the genitive singular

After два, три and четы́ре the noun goes into the genitive singular:

два стола́ (dva stolá) - two tables

три бра́та (tri bráta) - three brothers

четы́ре дня (chetýre dnya) - four days

Two has a feminine form, две, which the other two do not:

две кни́ги (dve knígi) - two books

две мину́ты (dve minúty) - two minutes

This is the group that looks wrong to English speakers, because two books are plainly plural and the noun looks singular. It is a fossil of the old Slavic dual, a separate number for pairs of things: the dual belonged to two, three and four came to copy it, and it collapsed into what is now spelled identically to the genitive singular. You do not need the history to use it. You need to know that two to four always pull the noun into that one form.

Five and up: the genitive plural

From пять onwards, through the teens and up to два́дцать, the noun goes into the genitive plural:

пять книг (pyat knig) - five books

де́сять мину́т (désyat minút) - ten minutes

шесть дней (shest dney) - six days

The genitive plural is the most irregular row in the Russian case tables, which is why this group costs more than the other two. Кни́га loses its ending entirely to give книг; стол gains one to give столов. Learn the genitive plural of each common noun as you meet it, rather than trying to derive it.

The reason for this group is also historical: five and above were once nouns in their own right, meaning a five of, and a noun of quantity takes the genitive plural in Russian exactly as мно́го (many) and не́сколько (several) still do. Мно́го книг and пять книг are the same construction.