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Take a half hour out of your life and learn this (counters)

#26
*Exhumes thread*

So I've been messing around, trying to work on some counters I've been avoiding, and I came across some useful sites in my pursuit.

The Counting Dicitonary:
http://www.shurey.com/countdic/index.html

A great basic primer on counters:
http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/japanese/counter.html

This overly-ambitious one contains a lot of counters nobody uses anymore:
http://www.trussel.com/jcount.htm

WagaWiki's Page on Counters:
http://www.thejapanesepage.com/w/index.p...e=Counters

And the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar has a great couple of pages on counters on pages 604-607, with a fascinating breakdown of counting patterns by type from A to F, with some exceptions.

My goal is to find short sentences that will give me good examples of counters at critical difference points (1,3,6,8,10) and with some different nouns that are used with them. The tricky bit is to do this without going nuts or overloading my deck with counters.

If anyone has a secret stash of counter sentences, I'd love to know about it. Otherwise, I guess I'll be pounding on the ALC site for a few days.

EDIT: Tim in Takamatsu's site has a good page on Counters/Counting (And Japanese in General.) It uses a lot of romaaji, but I'll ignore that if it explains what I'm trying to get at:
http://www.timwerx.net/language/numbers.htm
http://www.timwerx.net/home/index.htm
The first link is to the numbers/counters info, the second is to his homepage. He's written some other stuff on Japanese in general as well.
Edited: 2008-12-08, 12:33 pm
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#27
wrightak Wrote:Quick bit of trivia for you, which most Japanese people don't know.

For counting animals you have two choices ~ひき (e.g. にわとりが二匹いる) and ~とう (e.g. 牛が二頭いる)

The question is which to use and you decide by comparing the size of the animal to the size of a human. If it's larger, you say とう and if it's smaller, you say ひき.
you forgot 羽, which interestingly is the counter for rabbits as well as birds.
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#28
My teacher pondered that it may be because rabbit ears look like bird's wings Big Grin
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