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Lesson 9A1

Numbers 11–100

Numbers 11–100

Swedish numbers above ten settle quickly into a clear, compound pattern — and, unlike English, the whole number is written and said as one solid word.

Grammar Comparison

Grammar Comparison

11–19 have their own forms, close to their single-digit roots

Swedish

elva, tolv, tretton, fjorton, femton

English

eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen

Like English "eleven" and "twelve", the Swedish teens aren't fully predictable from scratch — but from 13 onward you can hear the root number inside them: tretton (13) clearly contains tre (three), fjorton (14) contains fyra's root, femton (15) contains fem (five). The -ton ending marks "teen", parallel to English.

Compound numbers are written as one unbroken word

Swedish

tjugoett (twenty-one), trettiofem (thirty-five)

English

twenty-one, thirty-five

Where English keeps a hyphen between the tens and units ("twenty-one"), Swedish fuses the whole number into a single word with no space or hyphen at all: tjugoett, trettiofem. This holds true for numbers of any length — the entire number, however many digits, is one continuous word in writing.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary

elvaEL-vah
English
eleven
tolvtolv
English
twelve
trettonTREH-ton
English
thirteen
femtonFEM-ton
English
fifteen
tjugoSHOO-goo
English
twenty
trettioTREH-tee-oo
English
thirty
fyrtioFUR-tee-oo
English
forty
femtioFEM-tee-oo
English
fifty
tjugoettSHOO-goo-et
English
twenty-one
trettiofemTREH-tee-oo-fem
English
thirty-five
hundraHOON-drah
English
one hundred