Learn Japanese

Lesson 71: Introduction to counters

Counters are suffixes that combine with numbers when different things are counted. Unlike in English where the thing you are counting directly follows the number (e.g. 25 pencils), in Japanese there are dozens of different counter words for this purpose. In this lesson we introduce the counter 人にん used for counting numbers of people.　

Counter words directly follow the number of the thing you are counting. For example, 200 people is written 200人にん. Counters tend to contain irregularities in the way they are pronounced for certain numbers. For 人にん there are four irregularities. They are for the numbers 1, 2, 4, and 7, as shown in the table below.

Below are some example sentences to show you how counters are used in context.