Adventures with Japanese Numbers: Counting, Usage, and Culture

by R. Byron Bird, Reiji Mezaki

Unfortunately for those language learners with backgrounds in science and engineering, most Japanese textbooks don't treat numbers in much depth, beyond a basic explanation of how to count. Most give little or no guidance in expressing even familiar concepts like fractions and percentages, and
none go into powers or square roots. This is where Adventures with Japanese Numbers comes in.

Authored by professional chemical engineers, Adventures with Japanese Numbers is the first book to give a general overview of how numbers are used in Japanese. After first covering the basics of how to count, the book moves on to more complex ideas--ordinal numbers, equal distribution, indefinite
numbers, polygons and polyhedrons. Here it also teaches cultural ideas concerning the use of how the Japanese count on their hands, the idea of lucky and unlucky numbers, and the concept of counters.

But that's only the beginning. The book also goes into the use of numbers in prefixes and suffixes; individual words containing numbers; and numbers used in geographical and personal names. It then goes on to show examples of idioms, proverbs, sayings, and famous haiku that contain numbers. At the
end of the book is some purely entertaining Japanese mnemonics for remembering pi and the square root of 3; comical names involving numbers; and fruits and vegetables that sound like they're made up of numbers.

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 5, 2000

About the author

Robert Byron Bird is a Chemical Engineer and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is known for his research in Transport phenomena of Non-Newtonian fluids, including fluid dynamics of polymers, polymer kinetic theory, and rheology. He, along with Warren E. Stewart and Edwin N. Lightfoot, is an author of the classic textbook Transport Phenomena. Bird was a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1987.