Introduction

When you start learning a new language, numbers is one of the first things you learn. To my joy learning numbers is one of the most useful things you can learn in Chinese and it's not that hard once you get the basics. After you've learned 1 to 10 you can start to use it for other things like:

• Date's
• Time
• Higher numbers
• Phone numbers
• Money
• Days of the week

Numbers 1 - 10

Here's a table of the first 10 numbers in Chinese.

Number	Hanzi	Pinyin
1	一	yī
2	二	èr
3	三	sān
4	四	sì
5	五	wǔ
6	六	liù
7	七	qī
8	八	bā
9	九	jiǔ
10	十	shí

Numbers 10 - 99

Using the numbers from 1 to 10 will allow you to count higher, you'll see it's as simple as stringing the numbers together.

Examples:

Hanzi	Pinyin	Number
十三	shí sān	13	10 (十) + 3 (三) = 13 (十三)
二十五	èr shí wǔ	25	2（二）+ 10 (十) = 20 （二 十） 20（二 十）+ 5（五）= 25（二十五）
五十九	wǔ shí jiǔ	59	5（五）+ 10 (十) = 50（五十） 50（五十）+ 9（九）= 59（五十九）

Numbers 100 plus

The same logic applies to numbers over 100, but there are a few new words you'll need first.

New words for 100 plus numbers:

Number	Hanzi	Pinyin
100	百	bǎi
1000	千	qiān
10,000	萬	wàn
1,000,000	百萬	bǎi wàn

One thing worth mentioning when using the number two above 100 plus numbers is to use a new word 兩(liǎng) instead of 二(èr).

Example of 兩(liǎng):

Number	Hanzi	Pinyin
200	兩百	liǎng bǎi
2000	兩千	liǎng qiān
20,000	兩萬	liǎng wàn
2,000,000	兩百萬	liǎng bǎi wàn

Another thing worth mentioning is the number 0 零（líng). This pops up when there is a zero and it's not the last number.

Examples of 零(líng):

Number	Hanzi	Pinyin
101	一零一	yī líng yī
309	三零九	sān líng jiǔ

You might be a bit confused why I didn't include the word 百(bǎi). This was intentional to highlight native Mandarin speaker may refer to a number omitting whether if it's in the hundreds. This may happen if someone refers to a hotel room number or a name of a place like 台北一零一（táiběi yī líng yī).

Taipei 101

When someone does says a number without omitting 百(bǎi), usually this means they are talking about money.

So with those little gotcha's out the way we can use what we learned perviously and say numbers up into the millions.

Examples of 100 plus numbers:

Hanzi	Pinyin	Number
七百五十	qī bǎi wǔ shí	750
三千三百	sān qiān sān bǎi	3,300
六萬六百	liù wàn liù bǎi	60,600
九百萬	jiǔ bǎi wàn	9,000,000

Summary

Hopefully now that I have gone over the basics of numbers in Chinese you can see it's not complicated and most of the time you can work out how to say a number just by knowing the basics.

I mentioned that once you learn numbers in Chiense you can then start to use it for other purposes listed above. In my next post I will try to go over these in Numbers in Chiense Part 2.