Comment number styling

Hello,
I am trying to wrap “N” and “comments” in “N comments” in two different CSS styles (see the comment box next to post titles in this example). I am clumsy with codes, and managed to do this very crudely as follows:

<div id="numStyle"><?php comments_popup_link('0','1','%'); ?></div>
<div id="stringStyle"><?php comments_popup_link('comment','comment','comments'); ?></div>

What is a better way to do this? For example, the second php call does nothing more than print “comment” or “comments” if comments_number() <= 1 or > 1, and is probably quite avoidable.
Thanks.