Is there a counter word dictionary?

[furrykef]

I'm wondering if there's a good resource for looking up what counters you use for a particular word... I don't care if it's monolingual or not as long as it's easy to get the answer.

I know it's easy to find plenty of lists online that say stuff like 本 is cylindrical things, 冊 is books, etc., but sometimes it's tricky to classify something in that fashion. What's a computer mouse, for example? And who'd guess that films are counted with 本? And how can you be sure that the counter is actually common? Shorter lists of counters tend to omit useful information, but longer ones tend to include useless information, and it's impossible to tell which is which. So I'm not really looking for that sort of resource; I'm looking for something where I can put in パン and it'll tell me a loaf is 斤 and a piece is 枚.

Anybody know of such a thing?

- Kef

[Sairana]

This is the most exhaustive "Japanese counter" reference site I have found on the entirety of the internet. I hope it helps you out some.

[furrykef]

Yeah, I'd already found that one, although that's still not quite what I'm looking for. I guess it'll have to do if there's nothing better, though... thanks.

[richvh]

This is what I've been using.

[furrykef]

That's just it, though... any list that big is going to have lots of counters that I don't actually need to learn. Maybe I should recognize them, but I wouldn't need them for production. Here I'm worried more about production than recognition. I know it's best to produce by absorbing the usage you see, but until then it's good to have a crutch, I think.

- Kef

[Yudan Taiteki]

Google can be a good resource if you want to test whether something is a viable counter for a noun or not; put in something like "マウスが二つ" and see what comes up.

Japanese isn't quite as exacting about counters as, say, Chinese, and you can get way with using the 一つ series for a lot of cases.

[furrykef]

Doesn't the 一つ series stop at 10, though? What if I want to say something like "This function uses 16 variables" -- what do I do then? (Other than rewrite the function, of course... )

[richvh]

個 is a pretty useful general purpose counter. I think above 10 you can use the Chinese numbers without a counter for random items.

[Yudan Taiteki]

Typically 個（こ）, although the number with no counter can be used too.

Although it's worth noting that the counters aren't set in stone -- searching for 変数 (variable) I found the use of several counters; 数個, Xつ, 項, and 個. I could only find a very small number of examples for >10 variables and they all used 数個, but you'd probably have to check a computer science or math text to see for sure. Functions with more than 10 variables aren't all that common anyway, which may account for the low number of examples.

[furrykef]

So basically the solution is, "Don't worry about it so much"?

[two_heads_talking]

So basically the solution is, "Don't worry about it so much"?

yep.. in fact Japanese don't agree on all the counter words anyways.. a simple 1,2,3 will suffice, if you aren't sure..

[arbalest71]

So basically the solution is, "Don't worry about it so much"?

Maybe- but the other solution is to get a copy of, say, K&R in Japanese and read it. You'll know what the counter for variable is by the end of it.

This is why actually reading stuff is a good thing, IMHO. No general purpose textbook is going to cover the counter for "variable". If you're a programmer you need to know that though, if you want to talk about variables in Japanese. There's probably no other way to learn that kind of thing beyond a basic level other than to go read specialist texts in your field in Japanese. You'll probably also want a specialist dictionary. The counter for variable is one thing. But how do you explain continuations in Japanese? How do you say "stack frame"? "tail-call optimization"? I have to admit that I have no idea how to say "tail-call optimization" in Japanese, but if I were planning on trying to get a programming job in Japan I'd be reading translations of the classic books I have already almost memorized in English.

More generally, if you read a lot of Japanese and pay attention to the counters, you'll learn them in roughly the order of importance, or at least frequency. If you're a specialist and you read specialized literature you'll learn them in a different order that meets your specialized needs.

EDIT: you might also take a look at the docs for Ruby if you're interested in learning Japanese computing terms. Since Ruby was developed by a Japanese programmer Ruby's docs have been translated to English rather than from English, which is not the usual case for a programming language's docs. I don't know how literal the translation is though, as I've never looked at the Japanese docs, and I couldn't read them without a lot of effort anyway.