Lesson 4. Numbers 0–100 and phone numbers

Phone numbers, ages, prices, and addresses are all numbers, and in Italy they're said more often than written in figures. Learn 0–20 as a list — see the table. The tens: venti, trenta, quaranta, cinquanta, sessanta, settanta, ottanta, novanta, cento. English writes “twenty-three” with a hyphen; Italian writes a compound number as one word: venti + tre = ventitré, trenta + cinque = trentacinque. Two traps. Before uno and otto, the tens drop their last vowel: venti + uno = ventuno, venti + otto = ventotto, quaranta + uno = quarantuno. And a number ending in tre takes an accent mark: ventitré, trentatré. In your answers, write numbers in words, not figures. A phone number is read one digit at a time or in pairs, and 0 is zero, never “oh”: zero tre nove… Common mistakes: • NOT “ventiuno” → “ventuno”. • NOT “ventiotto” → “ventotto”. • NOT “trentatre” → “trentatré” (the accent mark is part of the spelling). • NOT “Il mio numero è 45” in writing → the number in words: “quarantacinque”.