Ten numbers get you through a market, a taxi and a coffee order: jedan, dva, tri, četiri, pet, šest, sedam, osam, devet, deset. Learn those today. The only thing that trips people up isn't the counting — it's that dva, tri and četiri quietly change the word that comes after them. That rule is below, and once you see it you can't unsee it.
Published 29 May 2026
I always teach numbers early, because they pay off the same afternoon you learn them — prices, phone numbers, "how many?", "at what time?". And they're mostly easy: the words are short and, once you've got one to ten, the rest is Lego. But I also warn students on day one that this is where Serbian and Montenegrin sneak in a bit of grammar you didn't ask for. Better to meet it now, gently, than to be baffled later when someone charges you pet eura but the menu said dva eura.
These are the whole foundation. Say them out loud a few times — they're the building blocks for everything up to a million.
Only jedan and dva bother with gender. Jedan has three forms — jedan grad (one city), jedna kafa (one coffee), jedno pivo (one beer). Dva splits two ways: dva for masculine and neuter, dvije (or Serbian dve) for feminine — dva sata but dvije godine. From tri upwards, the number itself never changes. Small mercy, but a real one.
The teens are just the small number with -naest glued on the end. Learn the pattern and you get all ten for the price of one:
-naest is doing exactly what -teen does in English. Četrnaest and šesnaest shave a letter or two off (it's četr-, not četiri-), but the logic is the same and your ear picks it up fast.
Here are the round tens. Notice that most of them echo the small number: šest → šezdeset, sedam → sedamdeset.
To build anything in between, you just say the ten and then the unit, no glue word needed — English does the same thing without "and". Dvadeset jedan is 21, trideset pet is 35, devedeset devet is 99. That's it. You now technically have every number from 1 to 100.
A useful party trick: a phone number said fast is just pairs of these. Šezdeset tri, dvadeset osam… Once the pairs click, you can catch a number read at native speed.
This is the one worth five minutes. In English, "one euro / two euros / five euros" only ever flips between singular and plural. Serbian and Montenegrin use three gears, and the number decides which one:
Watch sat (hour) do the same dance: jedan sat, dva sata, pet sati. So "how much is it?" answered with money — jedan euro, dva eura, pet eura — isn't the shop being inconsistent. The number is bending the noun. Don't drill this into the ground on day one; just know it's there, and it'll settle as you meet real prices and times. This three-way split is pure case grammar in miniature, which is why numbers are secretly a lovely way in.
Sto is 100, hiljadu (Serbian) or tisuću (Croatian; in Montenegro you'll hear hiljadu too) is 1,000, milion is a million. Hundreds stack the way tens do: dvjesta or dvije stotine (200), trista (300), petsto (500). You'll rarely need these on a trip, so park them until prices or years actually demand them.
Do Serbian and Montenegrin count differently? Barely. The only everyday difference is dvije (Montenegrin) vs dve (Serbian) for feminine "two" — the ijekavian/ekavian split you'll see all over both languages. Everything else is shared.
What's the fastest way to make numbers stick? Attach them to something you say daily: your own phone number, prices at your regular café, the time. A number bolted to a real sentence beats a number floating on a flashcard. If you want a few of those sentences ready to go, our survival-phrases post has the ordering and money lines that use them.
Numbers are the rare bit of a Slavic language that gives back almost instantly — and the little 2–4 quirk is a friendly first taste of how cases work, dressed up as arithmetic. In Gora you meet them in real sentences, with the fox to say them back to, so the three-gear rule lands as a habit instead of a table you forget. Learn ten today; you'll use them before the day's out.