Hear it. Type the digits.
Chinese Number Dictation
A number is spoken in Mandarin — type it in digits. Six levels take you from 三 to prices, dates and full phone numbers, because numbers are the one thing in a sentence you can never guess from context.
- Listen — the number plays automatically; replay it as often as you like with the big button.
- Type the digits — hear 三百二十五, type
325. Commas, spaces and dashes are ignored, so3,521and3521both count. - Prices use yuan: 三十五块五毛 →
35.5. Dates follow the format hint:1998,5/12or1998/5/12.
Ready to take down some numbers?
Pick a level, listen, and type what you hear in digits. Start at 1–10 to warm up your ear, then go straight for the prices and phone numbers you will actually meet.
Context can't rescue you
Miss a word in a sentence and the rest of the sentence usually fills the gap. Miss a digit in a price, a date or a phone number and the information is simply gone — there is nothing to infer it from. Numbers are the one place where listening has to be exact.
The units arrive late
Chinese spells out its units — 三百二十五 is three-hundred two-ten five. That is easy on paper, but at speed you have to hold each digit while waiting for the unit that tells you how big it is. That buffering is a trainable skill, and dictation is how you train it.
Real life is level 4–6
Textbooks stop at counting to a hundred. Actual China is prices in 块 and 毛, dates read largest-unit-first, and eleven-digit mobile numbers where 1 becomes 幺. The last three levels here are the ones that pay off on day one.
The unit words
| 10 | 十 | shí | 二十五 → 25 |
| 100 | 百 | bǎi | 三百二十五 → 325 |
| 1,000 | 千 | qiān | 三千五百 → 3500 |
| 10,000 | 万 | wàn | 一万 → 10000 |
| 0 | 零 | líng | 一百零一 → 101 |
One 零 covers any run of internal zeros, and trailing zeros are dropped entirely — which is why 一百零一 is 101 but 一百一十 is 110.
The three traps in this game
- 二 vs 两 — counting uses 二 (二十二 = 22), but before a big unit or measure word it is 两: 两百, 两千, 两块.
- Money is 块/毛 — spoken yuan is 块, a tenth is 毛. 三十五块五毛 →
35.5. The written 元/角 rarely gets said aloud. - 1 becomes 幺 (yāo) in phone and room numbers, because 一 yī and 七 qī are too easy to confuse on a bad line.
- Years go digit by digit — 1998 is 一九九八年, never 一千九百九十八年.
Want to check a number in writing? The Chinese Number Converter turns any figure into everyday numerals, formal banker's numerals and pinyin.
Fourteen or forty? Listen before the answer appears.
The order changes the number: 十四 (shísì) means fourteen, ten plus four; 四十 (sìshí) means forty, four tens. The initial sounds and tones swap with the characters. The Chinese number and date pronunciation lesson explains how the number units combine.
Try two listening trials below. Each number plays twice, then pauses for two seconds before the answer appears. Choose your answer before the reveal; keep the transcript closed until you have tried both.
Transcript
- Fourteen or forty? Listen before the answer appears.
- Chinese numbers, two trials, choose fourteen or forty.
- First, listen.
- 四十 (sìshí)
- 四十 (sìshí)
- Forty, four tens.
- Now listen again.
- 十四 (shísì)
- 十四 (shísì)
- Fourteen, ten plus four.
- Listen for the order, the sounds and tones swap too.
- Same characters, different order, different number.
- Try Number Dictation, choose one to one hundred, at The Pure Language dot com.
Same characters, different order, different number.
Now make your own attempts: choose 1–100 in the level selector, press Start Dictation and type the digits you hear. Each new round gives you fresh numbers to answer yourself.