めのはなに? --did I get that right?

Well, in one of the level 1 lessons, there is this example sentence:

かれの二つめのあくぎょうは、かえるのあんさつだ。
His second evil deed was the frog’s assassination.

I understand that あくぎょうis ‘misdoing’, and ‘二つ’ is two things, so I assumed ‘めの’ must be a counter, but I couldn’t figure what, from wikipedia or jisho.org. Can someone help me with this one? And if wikipedia is insuffisient, is there a great big list of chinese/japanese counter words on the net somewhere?

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二つ目:slight_smile:

His second misdeed. :stuck_out_tongue:

Jisho.org: Japanese Dictionary 16. ordinal number suffix​

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might be good to read, also has a podcast talking about it

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It just occurred to me, shouldn’t that sentence be in present tense since “だ” is used? (or maybe this translation is more natural this way in English?)

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Well, the past is implied, certainly. If he has one evil deed, and then another, then he already has two, which means he already did it. The だ makes sense in Japanese, but I guess it would be ok using だった as well, honestly.

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Sort of like how, in English, present perfect is used to talk about past things, despite using the present tense for the auxiliary and having “present” in its goddamn name.

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This is why I love studying languages

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