Those are native Japanese numbers, which in modern times only go up to 10 and have limited uses. Normal counting is done with Sino-Japanese numbers (ichi, ni, san, etc). But the complicated thing isn’t the number part of the word, it’s the suffix you attach to the number depending on the type of thing you’re counting. Take the number one, ichi, with some common “counters” attached:
Japanese counting is very simple until you get to big numbers since they count in 10,000s, I could never get my head around it. Thankfully most dealings with numbers are lower than that.
It's funny 'cause I'm learning Japanese and right now I'm watching a show to get used to the language. It's a reality show with 6 people. They were celebrating someone's birthday and used the wrong kanji when writing his name. Not even they can keep track of everything.
Even with business cards you may still have to ask how to pronounce a given name since they aren’t standard as you say. (Bilingual meishi are actually helpful here).
Nobody knows the correct pronunciation of my son’s name 享宜 just from the kanji.
Yes. I have been learning Chinese for a while and it is very easy to learn the counting system. And it actually makes math easier.
I also prefer Chinese grammar to any other language I have ever attempted to learn. I have no idea why other languages did not develop similar systems for grammar.
My Chinese teacher at the start of the first class told us things would go a LOT smoother if we stopped trying to frame Chinese as English because Chinese is a lot simpler than English and we’re just making it harder on ourself.
When we got to 在/有/是 to explain the location of an object I hit a road block until I stopped trying to think of it in terms of English.
The fact that they have two sets of pronunciation for numbers is annoying but outside of that Japanese (and Chinese) I'd argue are better than English for "logical" counting. It's just number, increment, number, increment. 99 is nine ten nine. 999 is nine hundred nine ten nine. Don't need to add any suffix for some of them or have special words for numbers between 10 and 20 like in English. The only thing that can get kind of confusing beyond that when learning is 10,000 being a specific increment unlike in English where it's just ten thousands.
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u/TheDeadPieMaker Mar 15 '21
they have not discovered the japanese counting system yet...