Ch 1 · Lesson 26Japanese · Chapter 1 · Lesson 26 · Grammar primer
How Japanese numbers work
Eleven words build every number to 99,999: a digit after adds, a digit before it multiplies. And the sound changes that make 三百 びゃ.
The short version
Four, seven and nine each have two readings
、、。
Why?Hide
The old Chinese readings of four and nine, し and , sound like death and suffering, and for seven is easy to mishear as . So for any amount, a price, a phone number, a score, Japanese uses , and きゅう, and keeps them inside bigger numbers too: is 40.
A million is a hundred ten-thousands
まん えん。
Why?Hide
English groups big numbers in threes; Japanese groups them in fours, and its big unit is まん, ten thousand. So 100,000 is まん, ten ten-thousands, and a million is . Unlike and , まん always takes its one: 10,000 is .
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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Lesson 26 of 29 in this chapter