Anyone seen this - nan(counter)ka ?!

Hey all...

As part of my wife's and my self-paced study of Japanese, we bought a computer program called Rosetta Stone, which has an interesting set of methods for teaching language. It came well-recommended, and I think it's pretty cool so far, though I couldn't see using it by itself to learn the whole language.

Anyway, the latest lesson has been using a construction that I've never seen before and can't find an explanation of anywhere:

何(some counter)か
such as...
何台かの自転車 （なんだいか）- "several bicycles"
何匹かの犬 （なんびきか） - "several dogs"

Interestingly enough, the book All About Particles book mentions 何～も (e.g. 何度も to mean "any number of times") but it does not mention 何～か at all. This leads me to think that this form Rosetta Stone is using is rare or just plain wrong. Has anyone seen it before? If so, does it really mean "several," and is there a more common or natural way to say the same thing?

Thank you very much!!
Justin

wakarimasen said:

Anyway, the latest lesson has been using a construction that I've never seen before and can't find an explanation of anywhere:

何(some counter)か
such as...
何台かの自転車 （なんだいか）- "several bicycles"
何匹かの犬 （なんびきか） - "several dogs"

Click to expand...

It doesn't really need an explanation though does it? It's perfectly self explanatory.

wakarimasen said:

Interestingly enough, the book All About Particles book mentions 何～も (e.g. 何度も to mean "any number of times") but it does not mention 何～か at all. This leads me to think that this form Rosetta Stone is using is rare or just plain wrong. Has anyone seen it before? If so, does it really mean "several," and is there a more common or natural way to say the same thing?

Click to expand...

Never heard of Google?

If I pick an example at random, "何台かの車", 781 examples.
"数台の車" is about 10 times more common at 9,920 but I wouldn't be able to tell you the exact difference in nuance, if any, between them.

Okay -- sorry -- Yes, I had tried googling it and found the same thing you did; plenty of examples but no explanation. Though it is pretty self-explanatory, I just wanted to make sure of its meaning and ask if there was a more common version, which you gave me in ﾂ絶?? Being a beginner, I'd never heard of that one either, but now that you've shown me, it was easy to look up lots of examples in JEDict.

Thanks for your help. I'm sorry if I appeared lazy -- in fact, I've been working to figure this out for a while and only bothered you folks as a last resort.

Justin

wakarimasen said:

Being a beginner, I'd never heard of that one either

Click to expand...

I'll let you in on a secret - I did a WWWJDIC Search for Words with Restrict to common words [EDICT only] selected and the search term "several" to get 数個. Then I substituted the actual counter, 台, for the 'generic' counter 個.

EDIT: WOOOT! 2,000th post
Now I can never post again or I'll lose that cool number.

PaulTB said:

EDIT: WOOOT! 2,000th post
Now I can never post again or I'll lose that cool number.

Click to expand...

That's crazy, PaulTB. Get it up to 2,005, then post only once per year to keep it even with the current year.