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Why they are harder than they look, the pattern that saves you, and lakh and crore.
Hindi numbers are learnt, not built. English assembles twenty-one from twenty and one; Hindi has इक्कीस, a separate word worn down over centuries from a Sanskrit compound. There are effectively a hundred words rather than about thirty, and no amount of cleverness reduces that.
There is one real pattern, and it saves the worst part. Within each block of ten, the number ending in nine belongs in sound to the ten ABOVE it, not the one below. उनतीस (29) rhymes with तीस (30). उनतालीस (39) rhymes with चालीस (40). उनचास (49) rhymes with पचास (50). Hindi builds nine by subtracting one from the next ten, exactly as Latin did. Once you hear it, the nines stop feeling random.
What you actually need fluently is smaller than a hundred: one to twenty, the round tens, सौ (100) and हज़ार (1,000). That covers prices, ages, times and phone numbers, which is most of what a number is for in speech.
Above a thousand India groups differently. A lakh (लाख) is 100,000 and a crore (करोड़) is 10,000,000, written 1,00,000 and 1,00,00,000. Salaries, property prices and news figures all use them, so learn them early or half of every financial conversation will be unintelligible.
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