Numbers by ear
Free French numbers listening practice with real audio: prices, times, phone numbers, spoken by a French voice. Hear the clip, replay it, pick the number. Scored on the page, and the answer key lets you re-listen with the text.
Was that seventy-five or sixty-five?
You hear a number, a price, or a train time, then pick the digits. This is the skill that fails at the register, when soixante-quinze lands in your head as 65.
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French numbers listening practice that actually hurts
Numbers are where French listening fails first in real life: a price at the bakery, a platform announcement, a phone number said once. The traps are precise. Soixante-quinze and soixante-cinq share their first two syllables; deux and douze differ by one vowel; quatre-vingt-dix forces you to do arithmetic while the speaker has already moved on. Reading-first learners know the system perfectly on paper and still freeze at the till, because recognition by ear is a separate skill they never trained.
Use the replay button without shame: hearing a number three times and getting it is progress, guessing is not. After scoring, the answer key plays every clip again with the written number, so you can hear exactly where soixante turned into soixante-dix. Once round numbers feel easy, real speech is the next step: The French Briefing articles have sentence-by-sentence audio full of dates, prices and figures in context.
Why can’t I hear the difference between deux and douze?
The vowels are close but distinct: deux uses /ø/, a rounded mid vowel, while douze uses /u/ as in English boot, plus a final /z/. At speed the /z/ is your anchor. Train your ear to catch that final consonant and the pair separates cleanly.
How do I stop confusing soixante-dix and soixante-quinze?
Wait for the whole number. French 70 to 79 is sixty plus something: soixante-dix is 60+10, soixante-quinze is 60+15. Learners decode soixante, relax, and miss the rest. The fix is drilling full numbers by ear until 60+15 registers as one chunk, not a sum.
Do French speakers really say numbers that fast?
Faster. Phone numbers come in pairs (zéro six, douze, quarante-trois) with no pause for you to convert. Prices drop the word euros half the time. That is why this quiz uses natural pace: slowed-down numbers train you for a France that does not exist.
