Measure Words in Japanese

Authors’s note: shifting gears a bit as I clear out the blog backlog. 😆

“Measure words” or “counting words” are an interesting phenomenon found in many East Asian languages, but less so in Indo-European languages. This leads to some challenges with counting things.

In English, we might say “one sheet of paper” or “two sticks of incense” or “a box of nails”. But we wouldn’t say “three things of fish”. We say “three fish”, or “three chickens” or “two cows”. People too: two senators, one customer, or three employees. So the use of counting words in English is limited. From what I recall of Classical languages such as Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, it doesn’t exist at all.¹ In Japanese, there are counting words for all of them, and some of these counting words can be pretty obscure.

Let’s look at some examples, but first, let’s review basic numbers from one to five:

Number	Japanese Word	Hiragana	Kanji
1	Ichi (ee-chee)	いち	一
2	Ni (nee)	に	二
3	San (sahn)	さん	三
4	Shi, Yon (yohn)	し、よん	四
5	Go (goh)	ご	五

Four is a special case since there two words for “four”, but for counting stuff, the word “yon” is used.

Anyway, let’s start with good entry-level counting words. For paper, and other flat things like it Japanese counts them with the word “mai” (枚), so counting sheets of paper looks like so (using Kanji):

1. 一枚 – ichi mai (one sheet)
2. 二枚 – ni mai (two sheets)
3. 三枚 – san mai (three sheets)
4. 四枚 – yon mai (four sheets)
5. 五枚 – go mai (five sheets)

By the way, it is PERFECTLY normal to use Arabic Numerals for counting too, especially for numbers beyond three.

• 1枚 – ichi mai (one sheet)
• 2枚 – ni mai (two sheets)
• 3枚 – san mai (three sheets)
• 4枚 – yon mai (four sheets)
• 5枚 – go mai (five sheets)

Anyhow, the important thing to understand grammatically speaking, is that counting words like this are treated like adverbs, and adverbs in Japanese IMMEDIATELY precede the verb they modify, as in this sentence:

紙を二枚使ったよ。

かみをにまいつかったよ。

kami wo nimai tsukatta yo. “I used two sheets paper”.

In this case, the counting word “ni mai” comes right before the verb to use (使った). It took me a long time to realize this. I kept using the incorrect grammar of nimai no kami wo tsukatta. This is wrong, but is more similar to English, hence my mistake. DO NOT DO THIS. Put the counting word just before the verb and you’ll sound a lot better.

Anyhow, mai is a nice easy counting word and frequently used. Another common counting word is “hon” (本) used for long things, bottles, sticks, and so on:

1. 一本 – ip-pon (one stick)
2. 二本 – ni hon (two sticks)
3. 三本 – san bon (three sticks)
4. 四本 – yon hon (four sticks)
5. 五本 – go hon (five sticks)

Wait a minute. Some of them aren’t pronounced as “hon”. Japanese, like many languages, has a grammatical feature called “Sandhi”³ where certain sounds change to make them smoother. English has lots of Sandhi rules, Japanese has relatively few, but one rule is that the “h” sound sometimes becomes a “b” or “p” sound in some cases: n + h = nb, for example. Another rule is that the “chi” or “tsu” sound sometimes becomes a small “tsu”.

Unfortunately, Japanese has a lot of little use-cases like this for counting. There’s no easy way to say this: you just have to memorize these oddities. Most of them make sense when you say them out loud because they evolved to be smoother for native speakers.

But I digress. We’ve learned mai (枚) and hon (本).

Let’s move onto people. This one is particularly tricky:

1. 一人 – hitori (one person)
2. 二人 – futari (two people)
3. 三人 – san nin (three people)
4. 四人 – yo nin not yon-nin (four people)
5. 五人 – go nin (five people)

Here, some of the words are complete different, and don’t fit a pattern. This is a somewhat extreme example, but it shows how some common-use cases just don’t always follow a pattern. There are times when you just have to memorize how to count something.

Similarly, for “things” (generic), there is a similar way to count:

1. 一つ – hitotsu (a thing)
2. 二つ – futatsu (two things)
3. 三つ – mittsu (three things)
4. 四つ – yottsu (four things)
5. 五つ – itsutsu (five things)

When all else fails, use the generic counter above (except on people!). There are many situations where that is sufficient. If you happen to know the correct, more specific counting word, use that instead.

Anyhow, let’s get back to specific counters. For animals, things get interesting because there are multiple counting words. To list a few that we saw at the top of this post:

• hiki (匹) – small animals and fish: ip-piki, ni hiki, san biki, yon hiki …
• wa (羽)- birds and rabbits: ichi wa, ni wa, san wa, yon wa …
• tō (頭) – large, or hoofed animals: it-tō, ni tō, san tō, yon tō …

So, two cows would be ni tō, while three chickens would be san wa, and three fishes would be san biki.

Let’s talk a bit about rarer counting words.

Tofugu has a great comprehensive list of all the counting words, and some of these are obscure even for Japanese people, but there’s a few worth calling out because they do come up.

You might think that chopsticks are counting using hon as we saw above, but it has its own counting word: “zen” (膳). A single pair of chopsticks is ichi zen (一膳), two pairs are ni zen (二膳), and so on. This counting word is ALSO used for bowls of rice, or bowls of beef and such.

Another example is “chō” (丁). The counting word is used for things like bowls of ramen and kitchen knives, among others. If you wanted to ask for three bowls of ramen, you could say:

ラーメンを3丁下さい。

ラーメンをさんちょうください。

Ra-men wo san-chō kudasai

This one is a bit obscure, but like “zen” (膳) it does come up from time to time, so it’s good to be aware of it.

As I alluded to earlier, this is not a comprehensive list. There are many counting words ranging from very common to very obscure, some even that day to day Japanese might not always know. There are a couple takeaways from this to be aware of as a language student:

1. counting words behave like adverbs, which in Japanese means that they immediately precede the verb.
2. some counting words have pronunciation that varies, in order to make smoother sounds. Some are just not pronounced the way you’d expected. You just have to know these, and memorize them.
3. It is not necessary to know them all. Knowing the most common ones is a good start, and over time you might learn the obscure ones through experience.

Good luck and happy counting!

¹ IIRC, numbers behaved like adjectives, so they would describe “two cows” as duas vaccas, since the adjective “two” must agree in case, number and (grammatical) gender with “cows”. English has very minimal inflection like this, so we just don’t do it. The Sanskrit version, btw, is dvau gavau because it still has a “dual” case between singular and plural. Ancient Greek dropped dual not long after Homeric Greek, I think. Sanskrit is thus a super old language, even compared to Greek/Latin because it retains some truly ancient grammar patterns.

² Originally from the “Sandhi” rules in Sanskrit. Sanskrit has a complex series of rules for sound-changes, and linguists borrowed the term to describe the same phenomenon in other langauges. Sanskrit has a lot of rules, Japanese has relatively few.