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Koichi says in the second lesson that learning numbers is pretty useless. I use and read numbers all the time in English so I’m just not sure why they would be useless to know in Japanese. He does cover it anyway so no harm done, just curious about everyone else’s opinions on this.
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This topic was modified 11 years, 8 months ago by
tgatz85.
AnonymousI don’t think learning numbers is useless… -_-
I think what he was trying to say is that learning numbers won’t get you as much of a return on investment as would learning something else at that point, but since you need to learn the numbers anyway, that point is as good a place as any. And to be honest, you only ever really use numbers when you’re engaged in some sort of financial transaction, telling the time and/or date, or giving your age. Sure, you also learn to say “there are six cats”, but how often do you say something like that in English?
Yeah, I guess I could see that. I’m a CPA so I probably use numbers more than most in my daily interactions.
Numbers would be pretty useful for reading/watching the news. And prices in shops. And telling the time/date. And arranging appointments. And really just counting anything (you might not regularly need to say anything about 6 cats, but counting objects is such a fundamental thing). It’d be silly not to learn them at an early stage.
Just some everyday situations in which you might need to understand numbers:
“75.2 dead in car accident”
“Yen up by 300 1/5%”
“The Diet will convene again on 32nd of Smarch”
“1 in 9001 people carry the SuperSARS gene”
“The time now is 2 minutes past 100 o’clock; time for the weather”
“3 blocks down that way, you’ll see a house with two yellow windows and one half-black half-white; turn right on that corner…”
“That’s 678/56 yen for the two dozen potatoes”
“If you can hold on another 20 minutes, I’ll get you to the hospital so they can reattach your head”Y’know, just the usual…
I’m not saying I agree with Koichi’s claim – I’m just trying to make sense of it.
That said, of your list, two… I mean, a couple of them are cases I mentioned in my post anyway, while the rest of them honestly don’t happen to me on a regular basis. =P
Well I just finished Season 2 and didn’t spend an insane amount of time on numbers. I just made sure to learn those annoying exceptions when dealing with certain numbers and from there I was set. However my speed at saying a number in Japanese is slow as heck, hopefully I will get that problem ironed out soon enough with a little practice :)
There’s a nice little quiz mode for numbers in the free version of ‘Human Japanese’ for apple devices (might be on Android too?). It’s mainly for listening comprehention, but also has a “show spelling” option.
Semi-related to this topic, and something I hope koichi or any other of the staff see;
I spent two weeks in Japan last summer, and literally every person I asked used よん and なな for 4 and 7, respectively. Not a single person used し or しち。Just my two cents :D
In some contexts, よん and なな are always used, in order to avoid confusion – when giving phone numbers, for example.
The that said, the avoidance of し for four is probably fairly common (since し = 死 = death… but you knew that already).
Using なな instead of しち also helps avoid confusion with いち.
Or はち
Incidentally, the spice 七味 is read しちみ. =)
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This topic was modified 11 years, 8 months ago by
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