The New Job
Nowadays I'm working in medical research. One recent task was to internationalise some UI, then localise it into Japanese. With little in the way of a clue how to do this, but having built up some Audible audiobook credits over the spring months, I decided to take advantage of my three hour daily commute to learn a little about the Japanese language and culture. After all, there's every chance I'll soon have the opportunity to visit Japan on the company ticket, and I'd like to be able to speak to people in their first language, without causing humongous offence. So I bought a couple of Teach Yourself Japanese audiobooks.
Linguistic Regularity
Boy, did they do a job on me. You would never think, looking at the Japanese writing system, reputedly one of the most horrendously complex in the world, that this language could be a clean and tidy, logically lovable, stone fox. But I was soon smitten. I mean, just look at some of these features. There are no singular or plural nouns, there's just the noun. The verb
to be, one of the most irregular in my native tongue, doesn't conjugate at all; it's just like
I be, you be, he she or it be. Month names are like
first month,
second month, and so on. Dates are in perfect ANSI order: the greater subdivision always comes first, so it's
year-month-day, or
yyyy-mm-dd. Ideal for sorting by computer! There are only 47 syllables in the language, and every vowel is always pronounced the same.
Of course that's just the first flush of romance; eventually reality and entropy make themselves heard. There might indeed be so many welcome regularities in Japanese, but then they go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like "there are three levels of formality for every sentence", or "men and women speak with subtly different inflections." This last, together with the fact that most teachers of Japanese are female, has the interesting consequence that male learners usually, unwittingly, start off sounding quite effeminate.
Numeric Logicality
But then there are the numbers. The Japanese counting system is beautifully simple and regular, with very few exceptions in structure and pronunciation. Again, the first idealistic impression is somewhat spoiled by reality, this time by the introduction of "counters". These are little particles which must be appended to numbers, when counting objects. Surprisingly, the particular counter used is often based upon the physical appearance of the thing being counted. Then again, certain numbers cannot be used in counting certain types of thing, but must be substituted with other special purpose counters...
Still, the basic counting system is quite easy to learn, interesting too, and if nothing else can at least be used while you count through the steps of kata in your chosen martial art (mine is press-ups-do). I considered it potentially a big win, both mathematically and scientifically, to count as high as I possibly could using this system. As a study aid I made a little text file, delighted to realise that all the kanji characters and superscript numerals available in unicode were supported in Notepad. Printed out and laminated in A6, it became a pocket reference card. Later in A4 format, it would become a placemat suitable, used in conjunction with a transparent plate, for learning your ichi-ni-san while eating your sushi.
Original Text Version
The version below can be copied to the clipboard as text, then saved in Notepad. Just remember to select one of the Unicode options, such as UTF-8, from the Encoding drop-down list.
0 〇/零 zero/rei JAPANESE NUMBERS REFERENCE CARD * Learn these exceptions!
1 10 100 1,000 10,000
1 一 ichi 十 jū 百 hyaku 千 sen 一万 ichi-man
2 二 ni 二十 ni-jū 二百 ni-hyaku 二千 ni-sen 二万 ni-man
3 三 san 三十 san-jū 三百 san-byaku * 三千 san-zen * 三万 san-man
4 四 yon 四十 yon-jū 四百 yon-hyaku 四千 yon-sen 四万 yon-man
5 五 go 五十 go-jū 五百 go-hyaku 五千 go-sen 五万 go-man
6 六 roku 六十 roku-jū 六百 ro-ppyaku * 六千 roku-sen 六万 roku-man
7 七 nana 七十 nana-jū 七百 nana-hyaku 七千 nana-sen 七万 nana-man
8 八 hachi 八十 hachi-jū 八百 ha-ppyaku * 八千 ha-ssen * 八万 hachi-man
9 九 kyū 九十 kyū-jū 九百 kyū-hyaku 九千 kyū-sen 九万 kyū-man
10⁵ 十万 jū-man 10⁶ 百万 hyaku-man 10⁷ 千万 sen-man
10⁸ 10¹² 10¹⁶ 10²⁰ 10²⁴ 10²⁸ 10³² 10³⁶ 10⁴⁰ 10⁴⁴ 10⁴⁸
億 兆 京 垓 𥝱/秭 穣 溝 澗 正 載 極
oku chō kei gai jo/shi jō kō kan sei sai goku
10¹² 一兆 itchō 8x10¹² 八兆 hatchō 10¹³ 十兆 jutchō †
10¹⁶ 一京 ikkei 6x10¹⁶ 六京 rokkei 8x10¹⁶ 八京 hakkei
10¹⁷ 十京 jukkei † † Multiples of 10: change -jū to -jutchō or -jukkei
10¹⁸ 百京 hyakkei ‡ ‡ Multiples of 100: change -ku to -kkei
10⁵²⸍⁵⁶ 10⁵⁶⸍⁶⁴ 10⁶⁰⸍⁷² 10⁶⁴⸍⁸⁰ 10⁶⁸⸍⁸⁸
恒河沙 阿僧祇 那由他/那由多 不可思議 無量大数
gōgasha asōgi nayuta fukashigi muryōtaisū
How It Works
The first thing to do is memorise the top left column, digits 1 to 9, and 10:
ichi, ni, san, yon, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyū, jū. Note that the horizontal bar along the top of a vowel just makes it sound "long" - some guides use double vowels for this purpose.
Next, to form the numbers 11 to 19, just use literally ten-one, ten-two, ten-three, etc. So that's
jū-ichi, jū-ni, jū-san, etc.
Multiples of ten up to ninety are found in the second column:
ni-jū (20) is literally two tens,
san-jū (30) three tens, and so on. Intermediate numbers are simply concatenated or added together, so 42 is "four tens two", or
yon-jū-ni.
It's a similar story for multiples of 100, found in the third column, although there are three little exceptions to be aware of - more or less subtle variations in pronunciation. I've marked these with asterisks. So although 3 is
san and 100 is
hyaku, 300 is not
san-hyaku but
san-byaku; note the hard 'b' sound here, and also the hard 'pp' in 600 (
ro-ppyaku instead of
roku-hyaku) and 800 (
ha-ppyaku rather than
hachi-hyaku).
Multiples of 1,000, as seen in the fourth column, also have exceptions marked at 3,000 and 8,000, although there isn't an exception for 6,000, which is just business as usual:
roku-sen.
Chinese Roots
Reaching 10,000 there's another little surprise in store, and quite an important one. It might help a bit to think first about English powers of 10. Notice that 100 (one hundred) and 1,000 (one thousand) both begin with the word "one", whereas 10 (ten) and 10,000 (ten thousand) don't. But actually, there is an old English number "myriad", one of whose older meanings is literally ten thousand. We might therefore think of 10,000 as "one myriad", and in fact that's similar to what the Japanese, following on from Chinese tradition, actually do. Ten thousand is best translated into Japanese via "one myriad", hence
ichi-man.
With that in mind, column five otherwise proceeds much as before: 20,000 is
ni-man (two myriad), 30,000 is
san-man, and so on without further exceptions. But we have just passed an important milestone here. Just as our big numbers tend to group themselves into powers of 1,000 such as thousands, millions, billions, trillions, and so on, each time multiplying by 10³ and adding another comma, so the oriental tradition is to partition into powers of 10,000, and groups of four digits. The importance of this structure is reflected in the use of the
ichi (one) prefix for 10,000: not just
man (myriad), but
ichi-man (one myriad).
The same caveat will apply to all subsequent powers of 10,000. But before getting to those, look at the next few powers which are
not multiples of 4, and
don't need the
ichi prefix. As shown immediately below the main table, we already knew how to construct:
- one hundred thousand (100,000 = 10⁵ = ten myriad = jū-man),
- one million (1,000,000 = 10⁶ = hundred myriad = hyaku-man), and
- ten million (10,000,000 = 10⁷ = thousand myriad = sen-man).
Next, we shall alight upon the Big Sequence, the powers of 10⁴ spanning 10⁸ to 10⁴⁸ (one quindecillion!), listed in the second horizontal table.
To Infinity And Beyond (almost)
So, now we avail ourselves of the long line of Powers of Myriad
(that's definitely the name of my next witching and wizarding trilogy, watch out JK). We have reached 10⁸ which is labelled
oku, but since 8 is a multiple of 4, we have to prepend this with
ichi. Thus, 10⁸, or a hundred million, becomes
ichi-oku. Two hundred million is
ni-oku. And so on.
Things chug along quite nicely until we reach one trillion, or 10¹². Everything we've covered so far leads to the expectation
ichi-chō, until we stop and consider the clumsiness of that utterance. Surely that is the reason the wise Japanese have decided to contract it to
itchō. Similarly, eight trillion becomes not
hachi-chō but
hatchō, while ten trillion is not
jū-chō but
jutchō (with the shorter
u).
Similar exceptions apply to the next big multiplier, 10¹⁶ (which becomes not
ichi-kei but
ikkei), as well as multiples of this by 6, 8, 10 and 100. There is a pattern to the modifications in these cases, codified by the daggered comments in the bottom half of the reference card (or placemat).
Finally, we reach the bottom 3 rows of the card, where the only reliable historical sources contradict each other. In a denouement reminiscent of the war between American and British billions (see Wikipedia for details,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers), there's a forking schism in which the same terms are used to count, simultaneously and incompatibly, using multiples of 10⁴ and/or 10⁸, into an uncaring infinity. Of limited scientific use admittedly, but why not take advantage of the Creative Commons licence, and print out and laminate your own set of Japanese Numbers placemats?
