Numbers (Part I)

Now that we have started to feel more comfortable with some of the familiar words used in Japanese, let's cover something that everyone is familiar with... Numbers!

Numbers, as you should know, are very useful and they're very easy to remember too. Here's the first list:

To use numbers to their fullest extent in Japanese, you'll need to know counters. Counters tell the numbers what kind of thing they are counting.

They can be a little confusing so we'll cover them in a later lesson.

In our list above, you may find 4 can be shi し or yon よん. 7 can also be shichi しち or nana なな. You will find that よん and なな are more common.

Using Counters

Some simple counters that don't make us change how the numbers are said are えん (en) "yen" and ねん (nen) "year". See how they are used below:

This is only small change, though; 1 yen is only worth a little less than a penny. In the phrases below, it says "year" first because it is telling us the number of the year not how many years there are.

Even if you don't know the correct counter yet, you should practice counting things in Japanese. Remember that practice makes perfect or at least very good!

More Numbers

Here are the numbers from 11 to 15 so you can count even higher! Notice that we're just putting ten before the number we want to say. This works all the way up to 19. Can work out what 16 to 19 will be?

Numbers are either always written in kanji or numerals because hiragana can get rather long and hard to decipher.