Slovak Numbers and Prices: What Changes When Spoken

You can learn the Slovak numbers from one to a hundred in an afternoon. You will still miss the price at the bakery counter, and the reason is not that she said it quickly. It is that the number changes the word that follows it, and that out loud most of that word gets thrown away.

The label says 2,50 €. The woman at the till says dve eurá päťdesiat, or more likely just dve päťdesiat. Neither of those looks much like the label, and the distance between the written price and the spoken price is the part that nobody bothers to teach.

Here are the digits, the grammar attached to them, and the sentences that get you through a market without handing over a note and hoping.

One to ten: jeden (YEH-den), dva (dvah), tri (tree), štyri (SHTIH-ree), päť (pety), šesť (shesty), sedem (SEH-dyem), osem (OH-sem), deväť (DYEH-vety), desať (DYEH-saty). Three things will trip the respellings up. Slovak stress is always on the first syllable of a word, without exception, so every capital letter in this article sits in the same place. The letter ť is the t in a British speaker's tune, which is why päť comes out closer to pety than to pet. And d, t, n and l go soft before e and i, which is why desať starts dye and not dee.

The teens are the digit plus násť, so jedenásť, dvanásť, trinásť, štrnásť, pätnásť. The tens from fifty up are the digit plus desiat: päťdesiat, šesťdesiat, sedemdesiat. Twenty, thirty and forty are irregular enough to learn separately: dvadsať, tridsať, štyridsať. Then sto for a hundred and tisíc for a thousand, and two hundred is dvesto, written as one word.

Slovak counts in three bands and the currency word takes a different shape in each. After one it is the singular, euro. After two, three and four it is the plural, eurá. From five upwards it is eur, which is the bare genitive plural and sounds like the word with its ending cut off. This is not a politeness thing or a dialect thing. It is the ordinary rule for every countable noun in the language, and the euro is simply the noun you will meet most.

Euro is neuter, which matters twice. One is jedno and not jeden, and two is dve and not dva. Cent is masculine, so it goes the other way: dva centy, but päť centov.

That last card is the one that catches people who have learned another Slavic language. In standard Slovak a compound number ending in one, two, three or four still governs the genitive plural, so twenty one euros is dvadsaťjeden eur and not dvadsaťjeden euro. You will occasionally hear the other version in speech, but eur is the form to produce.

Slovak writes the decimal separator as a comma and groups thousands with a space, so one thousand two hundred and fifty euros fifty is 1 250,50 €. The euro symbol goes after the number with a space, not in front of it. If you type 2.50 into a Slovak form you may be entering two hundred and fifty.

Out loud, the currency usually evaporates. For anything with cents in it, people say the two numbers one after the other and leave both euro and cent unspoken. Twelve ninety is dvanásť deväťdesiat and that is the whole price. Round figures keep the word, because päť on its own would be ambiguous.

Since 2022 cash totals in Slovakia are rounded to the nearest five cents at the till. The one and two cent coins are still legal tender, but in practice a cash bill of 4,98 € is taken as 5,00 € and a bill of 4,92 € is taken as 4,90 €. Pay by card and the exact figure goes through. If the number you hear does not match the number on the receipt by a cent or two, this is why.

Expect to be asked for smaller notes. Sellers at markets and in small shops will ask you this before they open the till, and the question is usually framed in the negative, which makes it sound sharper than it is.

Slovakia is not a haggling country in the way a reader might be expecting. In a shop, a supermarket or a café the price is the price, and asking for a discount at the till is an odd thing to do. Where a price genuinely moves is at a flea market, with second hand goods, with larger private sales, and sometimes at the end of the day at a produce market when a seller would rather not carry crates home. Produce priced by the kilo is normally fixed.

When the price is negotiable, the move is to ask once, politely, and accept the answer. Zľava is the word for a discount, and asking for one is a question rather than a demand.

Do not pluralise euro the English way. Eurá and eur are the only two plural forms you need, and euros is not a Slovak word. Do not say jeden euro either; the noun is neuter, so it is jedno euro, and the same logic gives you dve eurá rather than dva eurá.

Je to drahé means that is expensive, and it is a true sentence that is easy to use badly. Said at a stall while you are deciding, it is a normal comment. Said after a seller has named a price, it reads as an accusation that they are overcharging you, and the conversation generally stops there. If you think the price is too high, the usable move is to ask the discount question or to walk on.

The other quiet error is treating prosím as optional. Slovak counters run on it. A number on its own, handed over as an answer or a request, sounds like an instruction.

The numbers in this article are standard Slovak and they work in every shop in the country. What varies is the accent around them. The letter ä in päť is pronounced as a plain e by most speakers today, and you will mainly meet the older, more open vowel in careful speech and in some central dialects. Eastern dialects around Prešov and Košice shorten the long vowels and shift the vowels themselves, so the same number can sound noticeably different, though everybody switches to the standard forms in a shop with a stranger.

In the south of the country there are towns with a large Hungarian speaking population, and at a market you may well hear a price quoted in Hungarian first. Near the Czech border, Czech is understood by almost everyone and vice versa, but the Czech numbers are different enough in sound that it is worth knowing which language you are being answered in. One more thing you will hear occasionally: an older person converting a price into koruny out of habit. The koruna was replaced by the euro in 2009 at a fixed rate of 30,126 to one, and you will never need to do the sum yourself.

The phone is where numbers fall apart, because you lose the price tag, the till display and the seller's fingers. Two sentences solve most of it, and neither is rude.

In writing the vocabulary around the number matters as much as the number. A shelf label reads 2,49 €/kg for a price by weight and uses ks, short for kusov, for a price per item. Zľava is a discount, akcia is a promotion, and výpredaj is a clearance sale. On classified ads you will see prices written with a comma and a dash, as in 12,- €, which simply means twelve euros and no cents. Dohodou in a listing means the price is by agreement, which is the clearest signal in Slovak that haggling is expected.

Put the written form and the spoken form side by side and the pattern stops being mysterious.

Learn Koľko to stojí, learn the three shapes euro, eurá and eur, and learn to hear dve päťdesiat as a price rather than as two separate numbers. That covers almost every transaction you will have.

Add Môžem platiť kartou for the places that only take cash, and Napíšte mi to, prosím for the moment a number goes past you. Nobody minds writing it down.