Numbers
Eleven words by heart, one simple rule, and you count up to a million. Then the same numbers give you the time and the days of the week. It really is easier than in English.
This is all the memorising on this page: eleven little words. Listen to each card, repeat out loud, then move on to the next tab.
Lingala builds numbers like bricks, always joined by na (and): zomi na moko, ten and one, is eleven. Tens are ntuku, hundreds nkama, thousands nkoto. That’s all.
Watch how it works
The tens
Hundred, thousand, a million
Order and quantities
Type a number, or let chance pick one: the page writes it in Lingala and says it out loud, brick by brick.
Can you count? Then you can almost tell the time. The key word is ngonga: hour, clock, bell. There are two ways to say it, here they are.
The words for time
The everyday way
It works like English: ngonga (hour), then the number, with the minutes joined by na. For half past, add na ndambo; for “to”, say longola.
The old way, from sunrise
In the old days, and often still today, hours are counted from sunrise, around 6 a.m. So the first hour of the day is 7 a.m., the second 8 a.m.: just take away 6. Noon becomes the sixth hour, 6 p.m. the twelfth. You add the part of the day (ntongo in the morning, pokwa in the evening) to avoid confusion.
Nice surprise: in Lingala, the days of the week are numbers. You say mokolo (day) followed by the figure. From Tuesday to Friday, you can already name them!
The seven days
Three step outside the count: Monday is mokolo ya liboso (the “first” day); Saturday, mokolo ya pɔsɔ; Sunday, eyenga, the day of rest.
The week, the month, the year
Yesterday, today, tomorrow
You can count. Keep going!
Numbers come back everywhere: market prices, ages, the time, the days, Bible verses. Find them in the dictionary with the rest of the vocabulary.
Open the dictionary