More Numbers and Irregularities

I would make a terrible professional blogger-- sorry for the gap.


We've started to learn more numbers now, and have also started to come across what seems to be becoming a common place for exceptions to occur.  English is chock full of exceptions to all sorts of spelling rules ('i' before 'e'... except after 'c', and except like in 'neighbor', and except...), and grammar rules.  Grammar in Japanese seems to be much more consistent so far, but spelling is starting to have a lot of exceptions.

The Japanese word for "one hundred" is hyaku.  (Just like with 'ten' you can leave off the ichi (1) before it).  Two hundred is ni-hyaku (ni = 2).  Four hundred is yon-hyaku (yon = 4).  Five is go, so five hundred is go-hyaku.  The Japanese word for three is san, but three hundred is san-byaku.  Six is roku but six hundred is roppyaku.

This is done, apparently, because of pronunciation or some such.  There's a rule about it I'm sure, but as of yet the rule isn't apparent, so I'm just stuck memorizing.

Japanese numbers have a name for 'hundred', 'thousand' and 'ten-thousand'.  In other words, 20,000 wouldn't be 'twenty-thousand', but rather 'two-tenthousand'.  200,000 would be 'twenty-tenthousand'.  That's going to take some getting used to.


On a related note, I've discovered something else my brain is having trouble picking up, and that's all the skipped zeros in numbers.  A number like 2,456 in Japanese would be said something like 'two-thousand, four-hundred, five-ten, six'.  But 3,004 would be 'three-thousand, four' and that's it.  "Well duh, Sam, that's how it's done in English too!" Which is true, but for some reason my brain has a tough time making the jump over those zeros.  I'm waiting for the 'hundred' to come after 'four' but the number's just done there.

It's like my brain refuses to do any sort of short-term caching for Japanese, so I can't store the whole number at once and then convert it to numerals.