List of Japanese counter words [closed]

Question

What are the essential Japanese counter words?

For example -dai for machines, -mai for papers and stuff like that.

• What else to expect/know?

Thank you

Answer 1

The article at Wikipedia covers the common ones as well as a decent number of extended ones, and lists the exceptions for days, people, etc. as well as rendaku and number word changes (e.g. 300->san*bya*ku, 4:00-> *yo*ji).

Answer 2

There are entire dictionaries for this (数え方の辞典). Here's a link to a whole bunch. 個 (ko) is the most commonly used one. Japanese people use it often even with words that should have a special counter if it's a less-often used one. It can sometimes be annoying even for them to think of the proper 数詞! Here are most common ones I can think of:

• 人 (nin) for people
• 名（様）[mei sama] for people, used when referring to number of customers at restaurants, etc.
• 本 (hon) for long skinny stuff (pencils, pillars)
• 冊 (satu) for bound stuff (books, magazines)
• 枚 (mai) for flat stuff (paper, cds、shirts)
• 台 (dai) for machines like cars and computers
• 匹 (hiki) for most animals (four legged, insects, fish, etc.)
  • For some other animals:
  • 頭 (tou) for cattle
  • 羽 (wa) for birds and sometimes rabbits
• 回、度(kai, do) for number of times an action occurs
• 隻 (sen) for big ships

Etc. The list goes on. I happened to live near a harbor so the last one was useful for me (though it was still often substituted with 個!). You can just learn the few most common ones and use 個 for everything else, learning the less common ones as you go.