Hello,
Could someone help a clueless beginner please?
I unlocked the vocab item 何月. I read that 何 can mean “What” or “How many…”.
So 何日 means either “How many days” or “What day”.
and 何年 means “What year” or “How many years”.
Why doesn’t 何月 also mean “How many months” then? It only says “What month”?
Thank you for your help! 
That’s because durations of months are counted a bit differently.
xか月(げつ) means “x months” where x can be any number. So to ask “how many months?” you have 何か月.
何月(がつ) simply refers to “which month?” and can’t mean anything else.
Or 何ヶ月. Same reading.
(Explanation: That’s not actually a small katakana ケ, but rather a kanji abbreviation that’s read as か or が.)
Full kanji is 箇 btw. Figured I’d write it in hiragana since most beginner resources do it like that.
You wrote it in katakana the second time, though. 
Indeed.
I blame lack of sleep.
I remember how much problems I had with it when I first started Japanese – long before I found out about Textfugu and WaniKani… Iirc, it actually made me drop for quite a while…
Thank you 
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