You're at a falafel stand in Nablus, you want four sandwiches, and pointing only gets you so far. The fix is one word. Numbers one to ten are the first Arabic most learners say out loud for real, day after day, paying at a stand or counting out seats for a serveece.
Here's the full set, plus the handful of spots where English mouths slip.
One to ten
| # | Palestinian |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 | |
| 8 | |
| 9 | |
| 10 |
These are the bare forms. The ones you count on your fingers with, rattle off for a phone number, or use to answer "how many?" when nothing's attached. Put a noun behind them and some of them shrink. We'll get to that.
The sounds that trip people
Four of the ten carry an ' right in the middle: , , , . That apostrophe is the ' (the ayn), a squeeze from low in the throat. Say and back to back and you'll feel the catch land in the same place both times. English has nothing like it, so it stays awkward for a while. Don't turn it into a hard stop and don't drop it either. Dropping it can turn one word into a different word.
opens with kh, the scrape from the back of the mouth, the one in Scottish "loch." People reach for a k or an h and land on neither.
has the capital H, a breathy h pushed up from the throat, heavier than the h in "hello."
And starts on two consonants jammed together, t then n, no vowel in front. English speakers want to sneak in a little "i" and say "tineen." Resist it. Start cold on the t.
One small thing on : hold that double t a beat longer than feels natural. The long consonant is doing real work, and a short one makes it sound like a different word.
Counting actual things
Three through ten behave themselves until a noun shows up. Then they lose their final syllable, and the thing you're counting goes plural.
| Alone | Counting something |
|---|---|
| — three chairs | |
| — four keys | |
| — five minutes | |
| — six books | |
| — seven girls | |
| — eight brothers | |
| — nine children | |
| — ten sisters |
So "five minutes" is , never khamse daqaayeq. The full khamse only comes back when the number stands on its own.
Days and months get one extra wrinkle. A little -t slips in between the number and the noun. Three days is , five days is . Months work the same way, so five months comes out khamest ushhor. You'll hear this constantly, since anyone talking about how long something took reaches for it.
Two is already in the word
This is the fun one. To say "two" of something, you usually don't reach for the number at all. You glue -een onto the end of the noun and you're done.
Take walad, boy. Two boys is . Bint, girl, gives . Ktaab, book, gives . This is the dual, a feature old Arabic kept and most of its cousins dropped. No separate "two" floating around in the sentence. The ending carries the whole job.
The standalone number does exist. Counting on your fingers, or answering "how many?" with nothing attached, you say , or if the thing being counted is feminine. But the moment a noun joins in, the -een ending takes over and the number word steps back.
One comes after, not before
"One" is the oddball at the other end. When you actually say it next to a noun, it sits behind the noun, and it's there to make a point: a single one and no more.
A single boy is walad . A single girl is bint . The waaHad form is masculine, waHde feminine. Most of the time you skip it entirely, because a bare singular noun already means one of the thing. You only add it for emphasis, like when you asked for one coffee and the waiter brought two.
Once you pass ten
Past ten, the noun flips on you. From eleven up, it goes back to singular, even when the count is high. Thirty children is talateen walad, with walad sitting there singular while you mean thirty of them. Twenty-four notebooks is arba' u-'ishreen daftar, daftar singular again. Old English did something close with phrasings like "forty year." Eleven through the hundreds is its own guide. Get one to ten solid first, and at a falafel stand you're already covered.
