Numbers are one of the most useful things to learn early in Vietnamese. You need them for prices, phone numbers, addresses, times, and bargaining at the market. The base system is wonderfully regular — once you know 1 to 10, you can build most numbers up to 99 by combining them. There are just three small twists that catch beginners, and we will make them obvious.
Vietnamese numbers 0 to 10
- 0 — không
- 1 — một
- 2 — hai
- 3 — ba
- 4 — bốn
- 5 — năm
- 6 — sáu
- 7 — bảy
- 8 — tám
- 9 — chín
- 10 — mười
Learn these ten well; everything else is built from them.
The teens: 11 to 19
Teens are simply mười (ten) + the digit:
- 11 — mười một
- 12 — mười hai
- 13 — mười ba
- 15 — mười lăm — note: năm becomes lăm here.
That is the first twist: after mười, "five" changes from năm to lăm. So fifteen is mười lăm, never "mười năm" (which actually means "ten years").
The tens: 20 to 99
From twenty up, say the first digit + mươi (note the tone change from mười to mươi) + the second digit:
- 20 — hai mươi
- 21 — hai mươi mốt — "one" becomes mốt in the ones place.
- 24 — hai mươi bốn
- 25 — hai mươi lăm — five → lăm again.
- 30 — ba mươi
- 47 — bốn mươi bảy
- 99 — chín mươi chín
So the three twists to remember:
- mười → mươi when it is a "tens" word (20, 30, 40…).
- năm → lăm for five in the ones place (15, 25, 35…).
- một → mốt for one in the ones place from 21 up (21, 31, 41…).
Hundreds and beyond
- 100 — một trăm
- 101 — một trăm linh một (the linh, or lẻ in the south, fills the empty tens place)
- 200 — hai trăm
- 1,000 — một nghìn (north) / một ngàn (south)
- 1,000,000 — một triệu
Put numbers to work right away
The fastest way to lock these in is to use them with money. At a market or café you will hear:
- Bao nhiêu tiền? — How much is it?
- Hai mươi nghìn — twenty thousand (đồng).
Vietnamese prices are often said in thousands, so "twenty-five" usually means 25,000 đồng. Practise by reading prices out loud whenever you see them.
A simple daily drill: count your steps, your change, or the floors in a building in Vietnamese. Small reps beat long study sessions — the same idea behind our first-week learning plan. And if the tones on these numbers feel slippery, our guide to the six Vietnamese tones will help.