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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

> To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed"

The "desu" isn't strictly necessary. You can just say "oishikatta".

With that said, Japanese does have a bunch of curious features, like different words for ordinal numbers depending on what you're counting (e.g. "one, two" can be translated to "hitori, futari" for people, or "ippon, nihon" for long objects, or "ippiki, nihiki" for small animals, etc), a plethora of onomatopoeias even for things that don't actually make any sounds - notoriously, "pika" (as in pikachu) is word for the "sound" of sparkling, politeness conjugations (e.g. "da" vs "desu" vs " de gozaimasu"), and many other things.

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Counters are often depicted as a unique feature in Japanese but I think it originated in Chinese, as their use of counters are more systematic (e.g. instead of saying "this book", you can say "this [book-counter]" in Chinese, which is not allowed in Japanese "*この冊"). Also many onomatopoeic words exist in English, but they just exhibit in a different way (e.g. "glitter" or "slippery" sounds very onomatopoeic to me). Politeness is indeed an interesting feature, and I see a lot of Japanese natives (especially in their teens) struggle with it.

Disclaimer: I'm a Japanese native learning Chinese.

A very singular feature of Japanese, if not a unique feature, that stands out to most learners of it, is the variation in the numbers with the counters and the sound changes for how the counter sounds vary with the number sounds.

Consider the examples offered: ..."hitori, futari" for people, or "ippon, nihon" for long objects.... The "number part" varies considerably: one and two are "hito-" and "futa-" in the first case and "i-" and "ni-" in the second. In the second example, the counter is "-ppon", with a plosive stop; in the second, it's "-hon" with an affricate. The combination of varying number pronunciations and the

Japanese shares many, many grammatical features with Korean, including much of the politeness grammar system; however, when I looked over a Korean grammar linguistics book recently, I wasn't able to find anything to indicate that counting was as complicated as this.

I don't think it's as complicated as you're describing. There are just two systems; the regular case with regular numbers, and irregular cases using hito/futa/etc. One has to learn which counters use which system, but there are just the two of them.

Note also that ~hon changing to ~bon/~ppon is a general feature of Japanese compound words, it's nothing to do with counters specifically.

All the things described are real features of Japanese counting and are real examples drawn from the Japanese language.

There is sometimes variation where a person needs to learn which each number for which thing uses which system. For example, with people, a common way of counting is "hitori", "futari" (your irregular cases), and then "san nin", "yo nin", ... (your regular cases). It's not always that way; but the flexibility exists and that is quite different from Chinese.

The sound change -hon to -ppon and similar sound changes are not actually regular in Japanese -- there's not a clear phonological rule for them. Although counters don't generally vary in pronunciation for each count of the counter, many of the common ones do; and these variations must be learned per number, per counter.

The earlier commenter spoke to characteristics of Japanese that might seem unique to a student. Counters certainly are shared with Chinese; but these other things -- the variation in the numbers and the variation in the counter, itself -- are not.

Sorry, but I don't follow what you're disagreeing with. For the numeric stems there are two systems, and one learns which to use when, as I said. For the sound change, I didn't say it was "regular" (and I don't know what you mean by that here), I said that it's not specific to counters.

wiki: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%80%A3%E6%BF%81

As for whether it's unique, wiki suggests that Korean has something similar but I wouldn't know.

Sorry, but what are you saying is not in accord with the examples I gave or the rules I described?

My earlier comment did discuss Korean, by the way.

> The sound change -hon to -ppon and similar sound changes are not actually regular in Japanese -- there's not a clear phonological rule for them.

There is a loose rule for compound word contractions (adding tenten to the first letter of the second word), e.g. "sakura" gains a tenten in "senbonzakura". However, as you said, this is not universally the case. For example, "ehon" (lit. drawing book) is simply "e" (drawing) + "hon" (book), not "ebon".

My girlfriend told me that keigo is so complicated that even for Japanese adults like her who have been working for foreign companies and using another language for too long, going back to work at a Japanese company can be too difficult, as they have forgotten a great deal of it.

I'm trying to learn the language, but man it's difficult.

Although "glitter" and "slippery" may sound onomatopoeic, neither one is actually onomatopoeia.

The latter case is perhaps the easiest, since "slippery" is an adjective derived from the verb "slip", still in use. (The word "glitter" is also derived from a verb, but this verb is no longer used.) Generally, words that are onomatopoeia don't have an etymology like that; if they did, then the sound would not be the result of trying to create the impression of something. For example, the "-y" in "slippery" is there because it's an adjective. The extent of onomatopoeia in Japanese is indeed quite different from English (and Chinese).

ippon, nihon, and ippiki, nihiki are numbers with counter units added (different from hitori, futari). Counter units exist in English. It's common to say "I have 600 head of cattle" vs "I have 600 cattle". "600 head of cattle" is exactly the same in Japanese, "牛６００頭". The counters in Japanese are also often similar to the way we use the words in English. You don't say "I have 12 wines". You say "I have 12 bottles of wine". "12 bottles of wine" is very similar to "ワイン１２本”. I think "5 loaves of bread" also fits. You'd never say "I have 5 breads". You have to say "I have 5 loaves of bread"

I get there's a subtle difference but it's not that far off. We also say "I have 6 meters of rope". "meters" is the counting unit, which is the same concept as all the Japanese counting units.

As for the onomatopoeias, at some point you get used to them and they feel like they fit and you can start to pick them up without having them explained. Even the ones that don't seem like the make a sound, start to make a sound, at least in my mind once I've internalized it.

Not the same but in some sense similar, dogs don't say "bark" but with enough repetition many people perceive "bark" instead of the actual sound the small dog is making.

I think the difference (and what makes Japanese harder in this case) is that you can't stumble into the correct number suffix for a large number of mundane nouns. For example, "12 bottles of wine" uses words that are used in other contexts ("bottles", "wine"), so if you mash these English words together, you get a proper sentence that doesn't sound weird. This is because you have to use "bottles" to provide context. In Japanese, you have to know about the rule even to say "botoru wa ippon" ("one bottle"); "botoru wa ichi" stands out as broken Japanese as much as saying "me likes".

There's nothing context-wise that suggests one is supposed to suffix "hon/pon" (lit. "Book") when you're counting carrots, while tomatoes are counted with "hitotsu, futatsu". The rule for flat things is to suffix "mai", but while postcards are "ichimai, nimai", magazines are "hitotsu, futatsu" and pamphlets are "isatsu, nisatsu". Having to remember these seemingly arbitrary rules as a Japanese learner is often considered a bewildering experience.

Nitpicks follow. Tomatoes are counted in 個 (ko). The counter 本 for carrots and other things does not mean book in that context. The character just also means book, but has other meanings. Both magazines and pamphlets are counted in 冊(satsu) or 部(bu).

I agree there are more counters in Japanese. I'm just pointing out the concept exists in English. Another example is "I have 6 pairs of pants and 7 pairs of socks" is the same in Japanese. 足 as a counter means pair so "靴下７足" is 7 pairs of socks (14 individual socks). You wouldn't say "I have 14 socks" in English. You say "I have 7 pairs of socks".

IIRC 冊＝ bindings (very similar to the concept of pairs of socks, we have bindings of paper). So you count "sheets of paper" (枚）and "bindings of books" (冊）.

All I'm saying is there are lots of place in English were without a counting unit it's often awkward or ungrammatical. I agree it takes take some getting used to all the counters though and even Japanese have trouble with it as there's a game you play where you call out a thing and the next per says that thing +1 +the counter.

Example player 1: "Apple", Player 2 "apple ik-ko. banana", Player 3 "banana nip-pon. car", Player 4 "car yon dai. house", Player 5: "House go-ken" Player 5 might have just gotten that wrong and then everyone would laugh.

To me the most annoying thing about Japanese counters is not so much that there are so many, but that you also have to remember when the numbers that go with them will need on-yomi or kun-yomi (ichi, ni... vs. hito, futa...) (well, okay, that essentially depends on the counter itself being on or kun. Makes me wonder if there are jūbako-yomi or yutō-yomi cases, never looked it up). And if that wasn't enough you also need to remember when e.g. いち becomes いっ and when a h becomes a b or a p (ippon, nihon, sanbon...)

Edit: and there are the fun cases where it's not always on or kun: ichinichi, futsuka... or other fun exceptions.

I'd stick to the common ones, you don't need to learn them all.

Whether you want it or not, you'll end up encountering them, not necessarily with enough context to tell you what they are. Example from regular news: 1000軒停電.1000世帯停電.1000戸停電.(and they all point to something slightly different)

Of course, it depends what you use Japanese for.

Yes, it does depend. My recommendation would still be to follow up with what I said and master the common ones used for basic conversation first. Then work on the rarer ones that pop up in the news or when you're renting apartments or whatever.

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