Beyond the basic cardinals and ordinals, Japanese has other types of numerals. Distributive numbers are formed regularly from a cardinal number, a counter word, and the suffix , as in .
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As the character 元 in 欧元, is a counter word in Chinese, there is no need to put a measure word before the word. An example is: 五十欧元 (financial Chinese: 伍拾欧元) wǔshí ōuyuán for fifty euros.
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The small ke () is a Japanese character, typographically a small form of the katakana character ke. While identical in shape to a small , is actually an abbreviation for the kanji , specifically by writing half of the bamboo radical (). , alternatively written as (or ), is a common Japanese counter word. is also as an abbreviation for the Japanese conjunctive particle .
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Gomoku has existed in Japan since the Meiji Restoration. The name "Gomoku" is from the Japanese language, in which it is referred to as . Go means five, moku is a counter word for pieces and narabe means line-up. The game is also popular in Korea, where it is called omok (오목 [五目]) which has the same structure and origin as the Japanese name.
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A classifier (abbreviated ' or ') is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to "classify" a noun depending on the type of its referent. It is also sometimes called a measure word or counter word. Classifiers play an important role in certain languages, especially East Asian languages, including Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese. Classifiers are absent or marginal in European languages.
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In general, the counter words mentioned above are cardinal numbers, in that they indicate quantity. To transform a counter word into an ordinal number that denotes position in a sequence, 目 me is added to the end of the counter. Thus "one time" would be translated as 一回 ikkai, whereas "the first time" would be translated as 一回目 ikkaime. This rule is inconsistent, however, as counters without the me suffix are often used interchangeably with cardinal and ordinal meanings.
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In Sanskrit and some other languages, number and case are fused category and there is concord for number between a noun and its predicator. Some languages however (for example, Assamese) lack this feature. Languages that show number inflection for a large enough corpus of nouns or allow them to combine directly with singular and plural numerals can be described as non-classifier languages. On the other hand, there are languages that obligatorily require a counter word or the so-called classifier for all nouns.
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The size of a washitsu is measured by the number of tatami mats, using the counter word jō (), which, depending on the area, are between 1.5 m2 and 1.8 m2. (See tatami.) Typical room sizes are six or eight tatami mats in a private home. There are also half-sized mats, as in a 4.5-tatami room. The furniture in a washitsu may include a low table at which a family may eat dinner or entertain guests, while sitting on zabuton or a low chair intended for use on tatami.
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Georgian, Latin, and Romanian are notable languages with distributive numerals; see Romanian distributive numbers. In Japanese numerals, distributive forms are formed regularly from a cardinal number, a counter word, and the suffix , as in . In Turkish, one of the -ar/-er suffixes (chosen according to vowel harmony) are added to the end of a cardinal numeral, as in "birer" (one of each) and "dokuzar" (nine of each). If the numeral ends with a vowel, a letter ş comes to the middle; as in "ikişer" (two of each) and "altışar" (six of each).
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Korean uses two words (없다) and (않다) for (ない) in Japanese. Japanese often uses similar words (なに/なん/なんの) to include what would be either 'what' or 'how many' in English without specific distinction (the context of being next to a counter word makes the meaning clear), while Korean has an extra word specifically used with counter words to express "how many" (무엇/뭐/무슨; 몇). The two languages are also quite different in regards to the grammatical cases. The Japanese genitive marker no (の) is regularly used between nouns but the Korean genitive marker ui (의) is often omitted otherwise it's considered unnatural.
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The aforementioned jiè was being used as a general classifier before the Qin Dynasty (221 BCE); it was originally a noun referring to individual items out of a string of connected shells or clothes, and eventually came to be used as a classifier for "individual" objects (as opposed to pairs or groups of objects) before becoming a general classifier. Another general classifier was méi, which originally referred to small twigs. Since twigs were used for counting items, became a counter word: any items, including people, could be counted as "one , two ", etc. was the most common classifier in use during the Southern and Northern Dynasties period (420–589 CE), but today is no longer a general classifier, and is only used rarely, as a specialized classifier for items such as pins and badges.
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