Word lookup: numbers, counters, family, animals, colours, scenery

The set you read on a page

Japanese counts twice. This is the borrowed set, the one printed on a page and the one counters are built from.

Four, seven and nine have two readings each, and which one you use depends on the word. Read the reading the app prints and move on.

The counting-out-loud set

This is the native set, the one people use to count things out loud rather than to read a number off a page.

Four of them contain the small っ — the held beat from the kana reference, in the wild. This set stops at ten and hands over to the other one.

Sticking a counter onto a number

You cannot say “three dogs” in Japanese. A counter word joins the number, chosen by what is being counted, and the two often fuse into a new sound.

Words for the people in a story

Japanese splits some of these finer than English does. Read the English column first and take the word you actually need.

Japanese has no plain word for “brother” or “sister” — it has older and younger, and you have to pick one. And there is no single word for a grown man or woman either: you say “male person”, which is that same のno joining two nouns.

The animals a fable is made of

Recognising one of these on a page is enough; you do not have to recall it from memory. Come back whenever an animal stops you.

These twelve are the cast of almost every fable you are about to open. Animals move themselves, so they exist with いるiru and count with ひきhiki.

Eight colours, two kinds

Which group a colour belongs to decides how you attach it to a noun, so read the last column as you go down.

The word for colour itself is いろiro, hiding inside three of these: brown is “tea colour”, grey is “ash colour”, yellow is “yellow colour”. The five ending in いi behave like describing words; the three nouns need のno to hook onto anything.

The scenery of a fable

The weather, the sky and the places a fable happens in. Look one up when a scene will not come into focus.

Weather is an ordinary sentence

Weather in Japanese has a doer and a verb like any other sentence. Read the English on the left, then the Japanese beside it.