French numbers in context

Why a number gets harder the moment it is inside something

Counting is a list. You learned it once, you can run it in order, and running it in order is what makes it feel finished. Everything that happens to a number afterwards breaks that:

• You are not given a starting point. In a list you know 92 comes after 91; in a sentence quatre-vingt-douze arrives with nothing in front of it.
• The number is doing a job. Une heure is not un — heure is feminine, so 1 changes shape, and so does 21: vingt et une heures.
• Some readings are not the number at all. Le premier mai is the only ordinal date in the language, and midi is not built from douze.
• Speech runs the parts together. Deux dollars cinquante has nothing between the dollars and the cents, and the difference between hearing it as $2.50 and as $250 is one missed break.

So this drill never shows you a bare number. Every question is a sentence, and the number has to be recovered from it.

The five challenges

The same value gets asked more than one way on purpose. Recognising dix-sept heures quarante-cinq on the page, catching it when it goes past once at speed, and producing it yourself are three separate abilities, and they fail separately. A drill that only tested the first would let you finish it and still miss the appointment.

• Read it, write the digits — A sentence with the number spelled out in French. Write the number in digits. (10 items)
• Hear it, fill the blank — The sentence is spoken with a gap left on the page. Fill the gap in digits. (11 items)
• Fill the blank in French — A sentence with a gap and the digits beside it. Write the number out in French words. (7 items)
• Which reading is right? — Two French sentences for the same digits. Only one of them says that number. (11 items)
• Hear it, pick the number — The sentence is spoken and nothing is written. Choose which of two numbers it was. (11 items)

Progress is stored per question, not per number, so getting 17:45 right on the page and wrong by ear leaves the listening version in the queue and drops the reading one. That is the whole reason the five live on one page instead of five.

What the drill is actually built around

Nothing here is a random number. Every item is a pair — the number, and the number a learner writes down instead — chosen from the mishearings that cost real marks:

When you get one wrong, the panel names which of these caught you, in English and in Punjabi. Missing 82 for 92 is not carelessness — it is a specific, fixable listening failure, and it has a specific fix.

How it marks you

On the number, never on the punctuation. Type a time however you like — 14:30, 14h30 and 1430 are one answer — and a price as 2,50, 2.50 or $2,50. Dates are day-first the way French writes them, so the fifteenth of March is 15/03 or 15-3; a full date wants the year in four digits. Phone numbers can be typed with spaces or without. The format the question expects is printed in the box before you type.

What is not forgiven is a different number. 82 for 92, 16 for 60, 18:45 for 17:45, or a price with the decimal in the wrong place — those are marked wrong, because each of them is exactly the confusion the item was built to find. The one place accents count is the fill-in-the-blank in French, where zéro and février are spelled with them; there is an accent bar on that question for the same reason.

How to practise this

Count the pieces before you work out the value. Quatre-vingt-dix-neuf is four pieces and quatre-vingts is one, and hearing how many pieces went past is faster than doing the arithmetic while the speaker carries on. In a phone number, count the chunks: five chunks is ten digits, and a chunk is a two-digit number, not two digits.

The phone numbers here are written the French way, 0X XX XX XX XX, because that is the shape the TEF and TCF use — both are French exams, set in France. A Québec number is ten digits with an area code and is just as often read out digit by digit, which is the easier of the two. Train on the harder one and the other comes free.

For times, wait for the end of the phrase before writing the hour. Everything that arrives after moins subtracts from an hour you have not been told yet, so a learner who writes the hour as they hear it writes it an hour late, every time.

Use Slow only on the second miss, then replay at normal speed before moving on. Slow is a diagnostic; the exam plays audio once, at conversational rate. The drill uses your device's own French voice, so nothing is downloaded and nothing is recorded — and if your browser has no French voice, the listening questions drop out and the reading half still works.

Which drill to do first

If the numbers themselves are not solid yet, this is the wrong page to start on. Do the numbers drill until the seventies and nineties stop costing you a pause, then come back here — this one assumes you know the words and tests whether you can still find them at speed.

Everything in the drill

50 items across 7 kinds of number: Age (8), Price (8), Official time (8), Spoken time (7), Date (7), Full date (6), Phone number (6). Every sentence is written out in full with its digits, its meaning and a Gurmukhi respelling, so this works as a reading list whether or not you play a round — cover the second column and read down the first.

Last updated 2026-07-30. 1 more sentence pattern(s) drafted and awaiting review.A number that keeps catching you out that is not here? Tell us — this list grows from what learners actually mishear.

Keep going

• Numbers, dates and telling the time (full lesson)A1
• Numbers 0 to 1000, one at a timeGame
• Telling time: conversational vs. 24-hourGame
• Saying years out loudGame
• Minimal pairs: which word did you hear?Game