Counting things

Let’s now talk about counting things. When you want to state an amount or quantity, you usually cannot have “free” numbers in the middle of a sentence. You need to pair them with a special word that describes what type of quantity you are defining. These special words are called “counters” and there are a lot of them. Some are incredibly specific and change depending on the thing you are counting, but some are more generic and the rules aren't as strict as you might be led to believe.

It's like how in English you can’t say “I eat 3 breads”, and you have to say “I eat 3 loaves of bread” or “3 slices of bread” instead. Japanese works like this for most countable things.

The most common counter word is つ, however つ is also special because it does not go above 9. If you need to count more than 9 “generic” things, you need to use another counter (often 個, but you can’t always use 個 for everything).

As you can see, the pronunciation of these words is incredibly annoying to learn. Don’t try to memorize all this, just be aware it exists and get exposed to it via immersion. The same applies for a lot of other counter words like days (日), months (月) , years (年), age (際/才), etc. The readings are incredibly irregular.

One interesting exception, on the topic of age, is that ages are sometimes reported directly in numbers without a counter:

ボクはまだ12ですよっ！
I’m still only 12!

If you remember from a previous lesson, counters work like adverbs and can go almost anywhere in a sentence like adverbs do. Also, just like adverbs, counters cannot be marked by case particles. Even though they look like nouns, they aren’t nouns.

二人、兄弟がいる
兄弟が二人いる
I have two brothers

These two sentences mean the same thing (but the latter is more common)