I've taken a few months of Japanese classes, and I found an interesting difference in the way that they count compared to how we count in English. Let me point out how we count large numbers in English, and then I'll show how it's different in Japanese.

Disclaimer: The Japanese language uses three different sets of characters: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. I have not included any of these characters below, in an attempt to keep things simpler. Instead, I'm using Romaji, which is basically a way of writing Japanese words using the English letters. This is useful for beginners to learn how to pronounce the words. But if you do any further research into Japanese, you will likely encounter these different sets of characters. Be prepared.

English

In English, we have the ones place, and then the tens place, and then the hundreds place, and then the thousands place. And all of those use different words. But then next is the ten-thousands place, and then the hundred-thousands place. So at that point, we're counting thousands. And only when we get to a thousand thousands do we introduce another new word: millions. And then we have ten million and a hundred million. And then a billion. So every three zeros, we get new terminology:

• 1,000 - Thousand
• 1,000,000 - Million
• 1,000,000,000 - Billion
• 1,000,000,000,000 - Trillion

This matches how we use commas in large numbers: every three zeroes (or every "thousand"), we end up with another comma and another piece of new terminology.

Japanese - Small Numbers

Things are done differently in Japanese. First, I'll give you the numbers from 1 to 10, just to satisfy any curiosities you may have:

• 1 - Ichi
• 2 - Ni
• 3 - San
• 4 - Yon/Shi (Some Japanese ideas have multiple words. Here, either yon or shi can be used to represent 4. But that's another story...)
• 5 - Go
• 6 - Roku
• 7 - Nana / shichi
• 8 - Hachi
• 9 - Kyuu / ku
• 10 - Juu

If you wanted to say twelve, you'd say juu ni (10, 2). If you wanted to say twenty, you'd say ni juu (2 tens). Fifty would be go juu (5 tens). Fifty three would be go juu san (5 tens, 3). It works pretty simply here.

Japanese - Large Numbers

Now let's look at larger numbers:

• 100 - Hyaku
• 1,000 - Sen or ichi sen (thousand, or one thousand)
• 10,000 - Man ("Man" means "ten-thousand." Technically you'd say "ichi man" or "one ten-thousand.")
• 100,000 - Juu man ("ten ten-thousands")
• 1,000,000 - Hyaku man ("a hundred ten-thousands")
• 10,000,000 - Sen man ("a thousand ten-thousands")
• 100,000,000 - Oku (Technically, you'd say "ichi oku.")

In English, we were counting thousands. But in Japanese, we're counting ten-thousands. And only when we get to ten-thousand ten-thousands do we introduce another new word: oku (which means ten-thousand ten-thousands). Then we continue:

• 1,000,000,000 - Juu oku
• 10,000,000,000 - Hyaku oku
• 100,000,000,000 - Sen oku
• 1,000,000,000,000 - Choo (Technically, you'd say "icchoo," which is an abbreviation of "ichi choo," but now we're getting very complicated.)

So again, we've got a new word after another four zeroes. But when Japanese people write numbers using Arabic numerals, they use commas after every three digits just like we do in English. It must get confusing!

For more on counting in Japanese, check out this webpage, which was one of the pages I used to research the larger number names I had never seen before.

Sample Problems

1. Using the information above, determine how to write the following numbers in Japanese: 18, 31, 66, and 88.

2. Determine how to write the following numbers in Japanese: 123, 300, and 850.

2. Determine how to write the following numbers in Japanese: 6532, 65320, and 653200.