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Numbers
Ten words and a rule. Tap a card to hear it.
Numbers are the fastest useful thing in Japanese: a small, closed set that you can start using the day you learn it, in shops, on timetables, and on every price tag.
And it really is small. Japanese builds every number out of ten words and three units, stacked largest first, with five readings that break the pattern. Learn those and you can read any number up to a hundred million without having seen it before.
How to work through this section
- 1 Learn one to ten. That is the only list on this page worth memorizing.
- 2 Read the rule under it, then build a few numbers of your own until the assembly is automatic.
- 3 Learn the five sound changes. They are the only compounds the rule gets wrong.
- 4 Drill them in Practice, which will show you a number and ask you to read it.
- 5 Come back for dates, times, prices and counters once the first ten are automatic.
You are done here when you can read a price or a date without stopping to work it out. Numbers are worth returning to rather than finishing in one sitting.
Words used on this page
- The man system:
- Japanese counts in units of 10,000 (万, man) where English counts in thousands, so 30,000 is said as "three man". It is the one genuinely unfamiliar part of this section.
- Sound change:
- A compound whose reading is not what the rule predicts, because the sounds would be awkward together. 三百 is sanbyaku, not sanhyaku.
What these mean
Each item tracks how many times in a row you have answered it correctly in practice.
- Learning - right once or twice in a row.
- Familiar - right three or four times in a row.
- Mastered - right five times in a row.
A wrong answer costs you one step, not the whole streak, so one slip on a bad day does not undo your work. Nothing here expires.
1. The ten words you memorize
Everything else on this page is built from these. Four, seven and nine have a second reading each (し, しち, く) that you will meet in times and dates; the ones here are the everyday defaults.
2. After that, it is assembly
Three units do all the work: 十 juu (ten), 百 hyaku (hundred), 千 sen (thousand). Put how many in front of the unit, and stack the units largest first. A leading "one" is dropped: ten is 十, not 一十.
Type one in and watch it come apart. Nothing is sent anywhere, so this works offline too.
3. The five sound changes
These are the only compounds the rule gets wrong, and they exist because the plain reading is awkward to say. Learn them as words in their own right.
4. Japanese counts in ten thousands
This is the one part that is genuinely unfamiliar. English groups digits in threes and names each group (thousand, million); Japanese groups them in fours and names those (万 man = 10,000, 億 oku = 100,000,000). So 30,000 is not "thirty thousand" but three man, and a price tag reading 三万円 is 30,000 yen.
Past 9,999, stop translating and start counting in 万. Build a few large numbers above until the regrouping stops surprising you.
Every number, as a reference
The rule above produces all of these. Worth reading down once to see it hold, and worth coming back to when a reading will not surface. They are all in Practice.