USING JAPANESE COUNTERS

The counters are used to indicate the numbers in which specific things are present.

Different counters are used to indicate different objects.

Every counter has their own question word, and the Kanji ‘何’ is used to represent ‘what’.

JAPANESE COUNTER FOR PEOPLE 人

Here we go for our very first basic Japanese counter. You might need to use this one very often.

Be careful of the numbers indicating one person and two people as they use the Native Japanese reading.

JAPANESE COUNTER FOR THIN & FLAT OBJECTS 枚

In a company, you will use this counter whilst making copies of a document or when you go to a movie and want to buy tickets.

This counter is used for things like:

JAPANESE COUNTER FOR LONG & THIN OBJECTS 本

This is one of the most used counters in Japanese language. It is used to count cylindrical objects which are long and thin.

You can use this counter with:

• えんぴつ aenpitsu : Pencil
• き ki : Tree
• バナナ banana : Banana

JAPANESE COUNTER FOR FREQUENCY 回

This counter is used to indicate the number of times a certain action happened.

It is also used to state how many times a certain event has occurred or will occur.

GENERAL JAPANESE COUNTERS

つ is the last counter we are going to study in this article. This one is a bit different from above counters.

For this, you’ll have to recall the Native Japanese Numbers you practised in our Japanese numbers lesson. Even while learning those numbers, we use them with this counter ‘つ’.

Once you have the basic idea, you can create these tables on your own. To practice, some more counters are:

Note:

For 20 years old (二十歳), the counter used is ‘はたち’ (hatachi) instead of ‘にじゅうさい’ ‘ni jyuu sai’.

We will learn to use these counters in a sentence while learning the basic sentence structure. 

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MORE FREE LESSONS

• Past tense in Japanese

  Verb + た

• Object particle を

  Object + を

• Japanese prepositions: in, at, on

  [Object or Person] + うしろに + [Reference Point]

• Possessive particle の

  Noun 1 + の + Noun 2