How to Count in Chinese: 1 to 10,000 and Beyond

By Ray Banks·July 14, 2026·Phrases

Counting in Chinese starts with ten characters: 一 yī, 二 èr, 三 sān, 四 sì, 五 wǔ, 六 liù, 七 qī, 八 bā, 九 jiǔ, 十 shí — one through ten. Learn those plus 零 líng (zero) and every number below one hundred assembles itself with no exceptions: 11 is 十一 "ten-one," 20 is 二十 "two-ten," 25 is 二十五 "two-ten-five." Three more characters — 百 bǎi, 千 qiān, 万 wàn — carry you past a hundred million.

The numbers 0 to 10

These eleven characters are among the first any Chinese child writes, and several are pictographs you can read on sight: 一, 二 and 三 are literally one, two and three strokes. Tap any card to hear it.

If you're still shaky on the tone marks over those vowels, our guide to reading pinyin takes twenty minutes and pays for itself here — number words are short, so a wrong tone is the whole word.

How do 11 to 99 work? They build themselves

Say the tens digit, then 十, then the ones digit. Nothing is memorized, because nothing is irregular — no "eleven," no "twelve," no "twenty" that looks nothing like "two."

Note what's missing: 11 is 十一, not 一十一. In the teens the leading "one" is dropped in speech. (It reappears in formal written contexts and in the tens place of longer numbers — 一百一十, 110.) That's the closest thing to an exception in the entire system, and it's a deletion rather than a new word to learn. For a slower walk through every value up to a hundred, with drills, see Chinese numbers 1 to 100.

Hundreds and thousands: 百 and 千

Two more characters: 百 bǎi (hundred) and 千 qiān (thousand). They stack in front of the tens exactly the way you'd expect, with one rule attached — when a place is skipped in the middle of a number, you say 零 once to mark the gap.

万: why 10,000 is the number that breaks English speakers

Here is the one genuinely different idea in Chinese counting, and it's worth ten minutes of deliberate practice. English chunks large numbers in threes — thousand, million, billion — which is why we put commas every three digits. Chinese chunks them in fours, around 万 (10,000) and then 亿 (100,000,000). Reading a big number therefore means re-grouping the digits before you open your mouth.

The practical trick: mentally re-comma the figure every four digits from the right. 250,000 becomes 25|0000 → 二十五万. 3,600,000 becomes 360|0000 → 三百六十万. Salaries, apartment prices, city populations and view counts all live in this range, so the conversion stops being arithmetic and starts being reflex faster than you expect.

二 or 两? The two words for "two"

Both mean two. The split is about what follows.

• 二 èr — counting out loud (一、二、三), digits and phone numbers, ordinals (第二, second), the tens place (二十二, 22), and maths.
• 两 liǎng — before a measure word (两个人 two people, 两杯咖啡 two coffees, 两天 two days) and before the big units 百/千/万/亿 (两千 2,000, 两万 20,000).

Here's a data point no phrasebook can give you: across the 658 graded stories in the Literate Chinese catalog (141,730 hanzi occurrences, July 2026), 两 is the 101st most frequent character with 288 appearances, while 二 is only 140th with 216. In running prose — as opposed to arithmetic — the quantity word beats the counting word. Learn 两 as the default and 二 as the special case for digits and ordinals, not the other way round.

The catch is that 两 drags a measure word behind it, and Chinese has dozens. 个 gè is the general-purpose one and covers you in a pinch — it's the 10th most frequent character in our corpus, with 1,629 appearances — but the right classifier is what makes counting sound native. That's a topic of its own: Chinese measure words explained.

How do you count to ten on one hand?

Chinese finger counting fits 1–10 onto a single hand, which is genuinely useful across a market stall, a noisy restaurant, or a language barrier. 1–5 will look familiar; 6–10 are the ones worth practising in a mirror, because several of them mimic the shape of the character itself.

Two honest caveats. The 3, 7 and 10 gestures vary a little by region and generation — some people show three plain fingers for 3, and the fist-versus-cross choice for 10 is largely personal. And a vendor showing you 六 for the price means six of something — six yuan, sixty, six hundred — so the gesture narrows the digit, not the magnitude. Confirm with words.

Why does 一 keep changing tone?

Because it does, and nobody tells beginners. 一 is a first-tone yī in isolation and when you count — 一、二、三 — but inside a phrase it shifts to match what follows:

• yì — falling tone — before a 1st, 2nd or 3rd tone: 一天 yì tiān (one day), 一年 yì nián (one year), 一起 yì qǐ (together).
• yí — rising tone — before a 4th tone: 一个 yí gè (one item), 一万 yí wàn (ten thousand), 一样 yí yàng (the same).
• yī when it's an ordinal or a bare digit: 第一 dì-yī (first), 一月 yī yuè (January), phone and room numbers.

Write the citation tone (yī) when you're learning the character, and let the shift happen in speech — that's what native speakers do without noticing. The same mechanism moves 不 bù to bú before a 4th tone (不是 bú shì). You'll also hear older speakers, and some in Taiwan, shift 七 and 八 to a rising tone before a 4th tone; that variant is optional and disappearing, so don't drill it.

For the mechanics of what a "3rd tone" or a "4th tone" is doing to your voice, our pinyin guide has the pitch contours, and the app's flashcards play every number in a native recording rather than a synthesized one.

Counting money, dates, and phone numbers

Money

The written currency unit is 元 (yuán) but almost nobody says it out loud — in speech it's 块 kuài, "a piece." Below that: 毛 máo = 0.1 (written 角 jiǎo), 分 fēn = 0.01.

The regional difference is in the small change. Mainland prices routinely land on 两块五 (2.5 yuan), so 毛 gets real use. In Taiwan, prices are whole NT dollars — a coffee is 六十块, not sixty-and-a-half — so the sub-unit essentially never surfaces in daily speech. One Mainland landmine worth knowing: 二百五 (èrbǎi wǔ) is slang for "idiot." Say 两百五 for the price of something and nobody smirks.

Dates and years

Dates run big to small — year, month, day — and years are read digit by digit: 2026 is 二零二六年 (èr líng èr liù nián), never "twenty twenty-six." The day of the month is 号 hào in speech and 日 rì in writing: 八月二十号 = August 20th. In Taiwan you'll also meet the Republic of China calendar on official forms, where 2026 is 民國115年 — Gregorian year minus 1911.

Phone numbers

Read digit by digit, and 一 is usually pronounced yāo rather than yī so it can't be misheard as 七 qī over a bad line. 138-1234-5678 comes out yāo-sān-bā, yāo-èr-sān-sì, wǔ-liù-qī-bā.

Ordinals

Put 第 dì in front of any number: 第一 (first), 第二 (second), 第三次 (the third time), 第一百 (hundredth). No other change.

The numbers on your bank slip: 大写 characters

Here's a set almost no beginner guide mentions, and you will meet it the first time you fill in a cheque or a bank deposit form. Because 一, 二 and 三 can be forged into each other with a single stroke, financial documents use anti-fraud "capital" numerals: 壹 (1), 贰 (2), 叁 (3), 肆 (4), 伍 (5), 陆 (6), 柒 (7), 捌 (8), 玖 (9), 拾 (10), 佰 (100), 仟 (1,000), 萬 (10,000). You don't need to write them from memory — but recognizing 伍佰元 as "500 yuan" on a form saves a confusing minute at a counter.

Number culture: why 8 is everywhere and 4 is nowhere

Sound-alikes do real work in Chinese numbers. 八 bā resembles 发 fā ("to prosper"), so eights get bid up in licence plates and phone numbers. 四 sì shadows 死 sǐ ("death"), so hospitals and hotels skip 4th floors, and gift sets never come in fours. 六 liù reads as smooth-going and 九 jiǔ as long-lasting, which is why 99 and 999 turn up in wedding gifts and rose bouquets. Online, numbers double as slang: 520 (wǔ èr líng) stands in for 我爱你 and 88 for "bye bye." None of it is required knowledge, but it explains prices, floor buttons and text messages that otherwise look arbitrary.

Mistakes to avoid

• 二个人 ✗ → 两个人 ✓. The most common counting error learners make. Before a measure word, "two" is 两 — always.
• Translating 100,000 as "ten thousand ten thousands." It's 十万, ten wàn. Learners who keep converting through English lose the thread at exactly the point where big numbers matter: rent, salary, populations.
• Dropping the 零 in the middle. 305 is 三百零五, not 三百五 — the latter reads as 350, because trailing units get dropped in speech. That's a factor-of-ten error at a market stall.
• Saying 一十一 for 11. In speech the leading 一 disappears: 十一. Keep it only in the tens place of a longer figure, as in 一百一十.
• Freezing the tone on 一. Saying yī gè instead of yí gè is intelligible but instantly marks you as a beginner. Let the tone shift; it's the most audible fluency tell in the whole numeral system.

Where numbers become automatic

Numbers are the part of Chinese you cannot drill into reflex with flashcards, because the flashcard shows you 三十 and you translate. Reflex comes from meeting them mid-sentence, when you're busy with something else — 小李等了三十分钟 ("Xiao Li waited thirty minutes") in the free story Washing Clothes, or the wonderfully absurd 二十层厚厚的床垫 ("twenty thick mattresses") in The Princess and the Pea. Prices, ages, dates and quantities are everywhere in graded stories precisely because they're everywhere in life; Going to Buy Groceries runs a whole shopping trip through them. Read a dozen stories and 二十五 stops being arithmetic and starts being a word.

Once counting is comfortable, the next system built entirely out of numbers is the calendar — days of the week in Chinese are literally "week one," "week two," and the rest of our Chinese phrases guide covers the situations where you'll be saying them.