Big numbers (千・万・億・兆)

Big numbers are one of my weak points and it’s probably not just me. I feel like I just have to cram them. So here’s a neat table:

10^x Number Reading English
10^15 1’000’000’000’000’000 1000 兆 1 quadrillon
10^14 100’000’000’000’000 100 兆 100 trillion
10^13 10’000’000’000’000 10 兆 10 trillion
10^12 1’000’000’000’000 1兆いっちょう 1 trillion
10^11 100’000’000’000 1000 おく 100 billion
10^10 10’000’000’000 100 億 10 billion
10^9 1’000’000’000 10 億 1 billion
10^8 100’000’000 1 億 100 million
10^7 10’000’000 1000 まん 10 million
10^6 1’000’000 100 万 1 million
10^5 100’000 10 万 100 thousand
10^4 10’000 1 万 10 thousand
10^3 1’000 1 千いっせん 1 thousand

Resources for recognizing spoken (not super big) numbers. Latter one has counters attached to the spoken number, but you don’t have to type it, just the numerals.

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・Was originally making table only up to 億, but I figured might as well add 兆 too.
・In Norwegian, after “million” comes “milliard” not “billion”. So that’s adding to the complexity for me :laughing:


This might also be helpful as a visual:

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Simplifying for my memorization

Arabic numerals (3-digital grouping) Examples Calculation
一千(いっせん) 1k
一万(いちまん) 10k 一万円 10 thousand
百万(ひゃくまん) 1M
一億(いちおく) 100M 60億人, 45億年 0.1 bil or 100 mil
一兆(いっちょう) 1 trillion (1000k*M or 1 M2) economy, finance 1 trillion

Someone must have made picture diagrams, visualizing orders of magnitude.

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I think there are kanji for even larger numbers as well! trunky_rolling

Anyway, thank you for making this thread – it helps meowmorizing wricat

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That’s the long/short scales difference:

What helped familiarizing myself with 万 and 億 was setting my YouTube to Japanese: the number of views for videos is very often in this range.

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I didn’t notice this option. I wonder whether it will prevent YouTube auto-dub (or instead also, auto-dub into Japanese, not the obvious English original).

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It does this, yes. I find auto-dub annoying, even when in jp. If someone’s talking in english I want to hear them speak with their own words. Sometimes I even switch language to english if it’s something I really want to hear and then switch back to jp after.

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