Infographic by Japanesevideocast Source [x]
Are you trying to tell me that japanese has different numbers for different things?
Not entirely different. It’s still the number plus a suffix, but phonotactical laws cause people to say, for instance, “ippon” instead of “ichi-hon.” Makes sense if you have a feel for the phonotactics.
The generic counter and numbering for days of the month is a relic of classical Japanese though and therefore different, though of course they follow the same phonotactical laws.
But yeah, it’s like how in English we say “a drop of water” or “a sheet of paper,” except that in Japanese you say it for everything. Like, “Two sheets of ticket for the 9:00 showing of Seven people of Samurai please.”
@breast-centric-hostiliies we also have this to a certain extent in English, for example:
‘First’, ‘once’, ‘single’ all mean ‘one’
We also have ways to count units of things (hour, mile, person, day, number of incidences [once, twice, three times etc], gallon).
English also has collective nouns, for example a *herd* of sheep, or a *school* of fish.
Counters can be frustrating, but Japanese has these advantages when compared with English:
- no future tense
- no plural s
- no change in the ‘be’ verb (am, is, are) - there are only 2 irregular verbs (来る and する), in English over half of verbs are ‘irregular’, meaning their past tense and participle conjugations can be very difficult to learn (buy, bought, [was] bought)
- Japanese kana have only one possible pronunciation, there are less sounds in Japanese -you don’t need to define definite and indefinite articles in Japanese (a/an, the) -No countable and uncountable (or both!) nouns- you can’t have one toast, but you can have one slice of toast or piece of toast, however you can have one pizza, but also a slice of pizza. Consider how you can’t order one beef, but you can ask for one chicken and be grammatically correct, or whether you order a fish or some fish from the menu? All have differences in nuance and some are just flat-out incorrect. English is an absolute mess when it comes to countable and uncountable nouns. They are horrible to learn and have almost no rules, some things have 2 words that mean the same object but one is countable (noodles) and one is uncountable (ramen). All in all Japanese is, in terms of speaking at least, quite easy to pick up compared to English, so try not to let counters frustrate you, they actually often help to clarify things once you’ve got them memorised.
