Numbers (Part II)

Let's now take a step back from counters and do something a little easier. When you want to say larger numbers than ten, simply put ten before the next number. This works all the way up to nineteen. We already covered eleven to fifteen in Numbers (Part I).

For anything larger than nineteen, you'll want to put a number before the "ten". Therefor, twenty would be "nijuu" ("two ten" in English). With this, you can add a number after the "ten" to continue counting.

Counting in 10's

We can now continue counting from 10 to 99. However, I should point out that 40, 70 and 90 should never be pronounced using shi, shichi or ku. Always use yon, nana and kyuu as marked by ! here in the next table. With this, you can now say a number like 46 (yonjuuroku) or 74 (nanajuuyon).

Counting in 100's

Now, how about numbers between 100 to 999? This works pretty much the same way as before. However, pay careful attention to the changes in reading, marked by ! in the following table; this time to 300, 600 and 800 which are pronounced differently, just like when we covered Number Counters.

Examples of Larger Numbers

Here are some examples of these words to understand how they work. If you need to use a number bigger than 100 and less than 1,000, use the same pattern as the tens. Just so you can clearly see each number used, we'll add a white-space in the romaji:

The Hiragana is getting pretty long, right? Eventually, it may become harder to read too. We'll cover more about Kanji in another lesson but you can see here how using Kanji will make it much less to write and easier to read. For example: 七百四十二 (742) and 六百四十 (640). Fortunately in modern writing, you may just use the international numbering system: 1, 2, 3 etc.