![]() My birthday, 1981 is 昭和 56年 (The Showa era lasted from 1926 to 1989). The year is preceded by the era, for example the year 2000 is: 平成 12年. The catch is that there is another calendar which starts over every time a new emperor ascends the throne. All you have to do is say the number and add 「 年」 which is pronounced here as 「 ねん」. First, let’s learn the counters for dates Dates Vocabulary The counter themselves are usually single kanji characters that often have a special reading just for the counter. However, if you want to count any type of object, you have to use something called a counter which depends on what type of object you are counting and on top of this, there are various sound changes similar to the ones we saw with 六百, etc. In Japanese, when you are simply counting numbers, everything is just as you would expect, 一、 二、 三、 and so on. Here’s an example:įor negative numbers, everything is the same as positive numbers except that you say 「 マイナス」 first.Īh, and now we come to the fun part. ![]() There is no special method for reading decimals, you simply say 「 点」 for the dot and read each individual number after the decimal point. Zero in Japanese is 「 零」 but 「 ゼロ」 or 「 マル」 is more common in modern Japanese. Numbers smaller or less than 1 Vocabulary Notice that it is customary to write large numbers only in numerals as even kanji can become difficult to decipher. Unfortunately, it makes it all the harder for you to remember how to pronounce everything. Therefore, Japanese people have decided to make it easier on themselves by pronouncing them as 「 いっちょう」、 「 ろっぴゃく」、and 「 さんぜん」. Try saying 「いちちょう」 、「ろくひゃく」、or 「さんせん」 really quickly, you’ll notice it’s difficult because of the repetition of similar consonant sounds. This is where the problems start, however. Now you can count up to 9,999,999,999,999,999 just by chaining the numbers same as before. ![]() ![]() By the way, 百 is 100 and 千 is 1,000, but anything past that, and you need to attach a 1 so the rest of the units become 一万 (10^4)、 一億 (10^8)、 一兆 (10^12). Once you get past 1万 (10,000), you start all over until you reach 9,999万, then it rotates to 1億 (100,000,000). Notice how the numbers jumped four digits from 10^4 to 10^8 between 万 and 億? That’s because Japanese is divided into units of four. Notice that numbers are either always written in kanji or numerals because hiragana can get rather long and hard to decipher. In Japanese, it’s simply just “two ten” and “five ten”. Japanese is easier than English in this respect because you do not have to memorize separate words such as “twenty” or “fifty”. You can simply count from 1 to 99 with just these ten numbers. In general, 「 よん」 and 「 なな」 are preferred over 「 し」 and 「 しち」 in most circumstances. However, past ten, the reading is almost always 「 よん」 and 「 なな」. ![]() Kanji and readings for numbers 1 to 10 1Īs the chart indicates, 4 can either be 「 し」 or 「 よん」 and 7 can either be 「 しち」 or 「 なな」. However, thanks to the strong influence of the Western world and the standardization of numbers, when numbers are actually written, the split-off is three digits. So a number such as 10,000,000 is actually split up as 1000,0000. The Japanese number system is spread into units of four. I recommend you digest only a little bit of this section at a time because it’s an awful lot of things to memorize. To be honest, counters might be the only thing that’ll make you want to quit learning Japanese, it’s that bad. We will learn the most generic and widely used counters to get you started so that you can learn more on your own. Also, there are things called counters, which are required to count different types of objects, animals, or people. First of all, the number system is in units of four instead of three, which can make converting into English quite difficult. Numbers and counting in Japanese are difficult enough to require its own section. ![]()
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