Help with numbers and such

I know the numbers like sen being a thousand and if I want 8,000, then I would make it hatsusen or even 80,000 would be hachiman. But what about 800,000 ? I know 100,000 is Juuman but that is all, and I am only know 1,000,000 which would be hiyakuman right ?

I ask this because I was assigned in my Japanese class to write the population for six cities in Japan, which of course with the exception of Nagasaki, all have more than 1,000,000 people. If anyone can help that would be most welcome.

8000,000 is Hachi juuman!
You just have to put hachi in front of juuman.

Good luck with your assignment!

Ok so far like 40 million would it be yon hiyakuman or would I need to include yonman in as well. Also, what if I have a number like 12,430,800 how would I go about ordering it. Would I use whatever twelve million is first than move onto 400,000 and then 800 ?

40,000,000 = yon sen man.
yon hyaku man = 4,000,000

10,000,000 = sen man (or issen man)
02,000,000 = ni hyaku man
00,400,000 = yonjyuu man
00,030,000 = san man
00,000,800 = happyaku
12,430,800 = sen ni hyaku yonjuu san man happyaku

instead of putting "man" every single time,
we ignore the ones that come after the first one.

Have you ever wondered why we put the comma every third position? If you'll notice, it makes reading the numbers much easier. Such is not the case in Japanese, though. Even though the Japanese themselves don't do this, you'll find it much much easier to read numbers in Japanese if you put the comma every FOURTH position. Why? Because of the "man" (10,000) unit.

00,0001,0000 = ichi man
00,0010,0000 = juu man
00,0100,0000 = hyaku man
00,1000,0000 = issen man
01,0000,0000 = ichi oku
10,0000,0000 = juu oku
etc. etc.

When faced with a tough number, just rewrite the commas and you'll find it much easier to read.

I used to try this with my students when I taught Engish. I would write some long number like 145,657,985,274 and ask them to read it. Almost without exception they put their finger on the "7" in the millions place and started counting positions to the left, muttering "hyaku man, senman, oku, juu oku....." until they reached the first digit. Only then did they know where they were starting from.

Then I erased the commas and rewrote them every fourth position:
1456,5798,5274
and pointed out that groupings betweeen commas now reflected the way numbers are organized in Japanese usage. After that, everyone was able to effortlessly fly through reading off large numbers.

awesome tip mike, haven't heard that one before.

sorry to be narky Carth, but 8,000 is hassen, not hatsusen. small tsu.

For every day life, if you can remember that 'hyaku man' is a million and adjust accordingly in your head, you can get by. When you start watching the news, and hear about some company that dodged gazillions in taxes... it gets difficult, in which Mike's method is da bomb.

I will use this as a chance to say, that the Japanese method is very silly when you think about it. I think anyone here can figure out that in English we do Billion, Trillion, Quadrillion, etc. I'm sure there are millions of Japnaese that don't know what comes after oku (I believe it's 京 [kei]). It gets out of hand... I found a page somewhere that listed them all.

GaijinPunch said:

I'm sure there are millions of Japanese that don't know what comes after oku (I believe it's 京 [kei]).

Click to expand...

oh? that's a fairly controversial generalisation. i've never heard of kei, i thought it was chou (兆).
*checks dictionary*
yep, chou comes after oku. if i've heard of it i'm sure the japanese have heard of it
no idea what comes after chou though. might be kei.


EDIT: i asked a japanese friend what came after oku, and she said chou. i asked what came after chou, but she didn't know. she then asked another friend who said kei came after chou, and gai came after kei. interesting... not sure if it proves anything.

Just that not everybody knows it, which is my point.

Yeah, I meant to say Chou instead of Oku (whoops). But my point was, the English system systematically makes more since. Bi,Tri,Quad,Quin are roots our brains can deal with, even though they sound weird. 京、垓, 禾予, and 穣 are not.

The reason I came up w/ this, was b/c one of the latter question on the Japanese "Who wants to be a millionaire" one time was "What comes after 京" and the guy got it wrong. Does that mean nobody knows? No, but it doesn't seem to be common knowledge. Of course, I might have my expectations of westerners way too high.