How to Count to 10 in Welsh (Say Them Out Loud)

The numbers 1 to 10 in Welsh

Welsh is highly phonetic once you learn its letters. Here are the numbers with pronunciation hints.

• 1 un (een)
• 2 dau (dai, rhymes with eye)
• 3 tri (tree)
• 4 pedwar (PED-war)
• 5 pump (pimp)
• 6 chwech (khwekh)
• 7 saith (saith, rhymes with scythe)
• 8 wyth (ooith)
• 9 naw (nau, rhymes with now)
• 10 deg (deg)

In Welsh, w is often a vowel (an oo sound), u is close to ee, and ch is a throaty sound like the ch in the Scottish loch.

The Welsh ll (and ch in chwech)

Welsh is famous for the ll sound, and while it does not appear in the numbers 1 to 10, its cousin, the throaty ch, does, in chwech (six). The ch is not an English ch. It is the rasping sound at the end of the Scottish loch, made by pushing air past the back of the tongue.

So chwech is roughly khwekh, with that throaty rasp at both ends and a w-glide in the middle. It is the hardest of the ten numbers for English speakers. Do not force it; let air flow past the raised back of your tongue. A close approximation is understood, and once you can make the ch, you are most of the way to the famous ll too, which uses a similar breathy release.

When the numbers change form

Here is the detail beginners miss. A few Welsh numbers have masculine and feminine forms, because Welsh nouns have grammatical gender. The forms above are the ones used for plain counting, but when you count actual nouns, some change.

Two is dau before masculine nouns and dwy before feminine ones. Three is tri (masculine) or tair (feminine), and four is pedwar (masculine) or pedair (feminine). The other numbers stay the same. You do not need all of this to count out loud, so learn the counting forms first. Just know that when you start attaching numbers to nouns, two, three, and four will sometimes shift to their feminine forms.

Common mistakes learners make

English speakers repeat a few errors.

• English ch in chwech. It is a throaty loch sound, giving khwekh.
• Reading w as a consonant. In wyth, the w is a vowel, an oo sound, giving ooith.
• Saying u as English uh. Welsh u is close to ee, so un is een.
• Forgetting the gender forms. With nouns, two, three, and four have feminine variants.

Learning the counting forms first keeps things simple.

How to make them stick

The throaty ch and the vowel-like w are sounds and habits English does not share, so reading the list once does little. You build them by saying the numbers out loud and copying native audio.

Count stairs, count coins, say your phone number one digit at a time. The best drill is trading numbers with a real speaker or an AI speaking partner that answers back, so you produce the loch sound under a little pressure rather than only recognizing it. Short spoken sessions beat long silent ones, and Welsh, which sounds far more approachable than it looks on paper, starts to feel natural within a few days.

Counting past 10

Welsh actually has two counting systems past ten. The traditional system uses a base-twenty structure, where sixteen is expressed as one-on-fifteen and so on, which is beautiful but complex. Modern Welsh, especially in schools, often uses a simpler decimal system.

In the modern system, eleven is un deg un (one ten one), twelve is un deg dau (one ten two), and the pattern is transparent. So the ten words you just learned are the building blocks for the modern system straight away. Start with the decimal forms for everyday use, and explore the traditional base-twenty counting later as a lovely piece of the language's heritage.