There are plenty of things you can count on when you take a trip to Norway. You can count on seeing the beauty of the fjords. You can count on trying kinds of fish you probably have never had before. You can bet on bleak winter weather if you visit in January. What you can’t count on, however, is that everyone is going to understand you if you’re speaking English. And that’s why before you jet off, you should learn how to count to 100 in Norwegian.
To start, we’ll give you the numbers from one to 20, and then the tens after that. We could just give you every single number up to 100, but that would be too easy. Besides, it’s better to know how numbers actually work in Norwegian. Let’s get started!
Count Up To Twenty
Why not just count to 10 first? Because, like English, the ‘teens in Norwegian don’t work like the rest of the numbers. If English was logical, after all, we would have have numbers like “ten-one” and “ten-two” rather than “eleven” and “twelve.”
zero — null
one — en
two — to
three — tre
four — fire
five — fem
six — seks
seven — sju
eight — åtte
nine — ni
ten — ti
eleven — elleve
twelve — tolv
thirteen — tretten
fourteen — fjorten
fifteen — femten
sixteen — seksten
seventeen — sytten
eighteen — atten
nineteen — nitten
twenty — tjue
The Rest Of The Tens
thirty — tretti
forty — førti
fifty — femti
sixty — seksti
seventy — sytti
eighty — åtti
ninety — nitti
one hundred — hundre
Putting It All Together
Norwegian has a fortunately very easy system for counting once you get past the ‘teens. You just put the ones place after the tens place, with no space or dash. So 29 in Norwegian is tjueni, 77 is syttisju and on and on.
Once you get into the hundreds, it does get a little more complicated, but not too much. Two hundred is to hundre, three hundred is tre hundre and so on. And then, to connect the hundreds to the tens, you use an “og.” Thus, 437 is fire hundre og trettisju and 866 is åtte hundre og sekstiseks. And with that, you’re ready to get counting!