I bet I can teach you to count up to 10 in Japanese in just 3 minutes
The power of visualization and mnemonics
Visualization techniques and mnemonics are extremely powerful when it comes to learning information. My school life was spent creating countless phrases to remember important information for my tests, such as the order of planets in the solar system, the colours of the rainbow, the electromagnetic spectrum and the wives of Henry VIII. I would like to share with you a mnemonic I made to remember the numbers up to 10 in Japanese. Hopefully, this will provide you with some inspiration to create your own memory techniques in daily life. Learning makes life so much more interesting, so it’s better when we know the methods which can make us learn more efficiently.
So here we go, here are the numbers up to ten in Japanese. Don’t get confused by the Japanese characters at the start. They are just the spelling of the number in Japanese. The pronunciation can be found in the brackets.
1- いち (itchy)
1 is pronounced “itchy”. So think of something itchy.
2- に (knee)
2 is pronounced “knee”. Now you have an “itchy knee”
3- さん (sun)
3 is pronounced like the word “son” or “sun. So just imagine yourself scratching your “itchy knee” under the “sun”.
4- し (shi)
4 is pronounced “she”. Just think of the opposite of “he”.
5- ご (go)
5 is pronounced go. Just think of ready, steady, “go”.
6-ろく (roku)
Think of the song “we will rock you”, and instead say we will “roku”.
7-なな (nana)
“Nana” means grandmother in a number of languages, one of which is Italian. Alternatively, think of a ba“nana”.
8-はち (hatchi)
Think of an egg hatching, and instead of the verb “to hatch” say “hatchi” instead.
9-きゅう (queue)
Think of a long “queue” of people outside waiting for the egg in 8) to hatch.
10-じゅう (jew/dew)
Think of someone who is a member of judaism “jew”, or alternatively picture the “dew” that forms on grass during the night. The queue of people in 9) could be members of judaism also.
Summary
The mnemonic will not give you perfect pronunciation unfortunately. Once you have mastered the numbers up to ten, the next numbers up to 100 will be relatively straightforward. For example, 21 is “knee-jew-itchy”: 2 (knee) 10s (jew) + 1 (itchy).
I spent some time in quarantine learning Japanese, and thought of this visualization method to learn the numbers. I also managed to learn both Hiragana and Katakana using the site Tofogu. Japanese has three different alphabets: hiragana, katakana and kanji. Both hiragana and katakana are phonetic. Start with Hiragana first and then Katakana (the phonetic alphabets). Hiragana is mostly Hiragana is usually used for most basic words and forms of writing. It’s also used on its own or in conjunction with kanji to form words. Katakana is often used to spell out foreign words, such as car names and superheros. Kanji are non phonetic and each character describes a different word. There are over 50,000 different characters in Japanese, so only move onto Kanji when you have mastered hiragana and katakana.
Here is a good guide for those wanting to try learning hiragana on Tofugu.
