this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
979 points (99.3% liked)

Memes

44124 readers
1727 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

To be fair, zero is a complicated number

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Bro first of all, no one should ever freeze a gyro, second, will you please elaborate because that is 100% interesting

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Basically certain words use a different counter, and it changes how you would say 1, 2, 3 etc. so there is a counter for big living things, small living things, flat things, round things, money etc. A lot of the numbers are similar with slight changes in pronunciation.

So instead of ichi for 1, it might be ippon, ittou, issoku etc. if you know it's a counter you can usually tell what the number is from the start of the word. Though there are exceptions like hitotsu, which is also one. Though if they use the "Chinese" characters you can know what it means when reading it without knowing how it's actually pronounced.