Japanese Through Anime. Japanese Prepositions. Specificity of Japanese Verbs. Some Japanese verbs are more specific when describing actions than English verbs.
While there is only one verb used for a certain action in English, there might be several different verbs in Japanese. One of the examples is the verb "to wear. " In English, it can used as, "I wear a hat," "I wear gloves," "I wear glasses" and so on. However, Japanese has different verbs depending on which part of the body it will be worn on. Nihongo o Narau - Learn Japanese. English to Japanese Romaji to English Dictionary. Japanese counter word. In Japanese, as in Chinese and Korean, numerals cannot quantify nouns by themselves (except, in certain cases, for the numbers from one to ten; see below).
For example, to express the idea "two dogs" in Japanese one must say 二匹の犬 ni hiki no inu (literally "dog of small-animal-count-two"). Here 犬 inu means "dog", 二 ni is the number 2, "の" "no" is a possessive particle, and 匹 hiki is the counter for small animals. These counters are not independent words and always appear with a number (or question word) before them. If the number is unknown, a question word is used, most often 何 nan, as in 何名様 nan-mei-sama "how many guests", or sometimes 幾 iku as in 幾晩 iku-ban "how many nights? ".