The Difference Between 万 and 十千

Okay, is there a difference between the kanji for ten thousand and the vocab word ten thousand? They both mean the same thing, so why is there a kanji for the word when putting 十 and 千 together does the exact same thing?

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Well i think they’re the same but more natural would be to say 一万

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I feel like saying 十千 would be comparable to saying 十百 (ten hundred). To the Japanese, 10,000 is as unique a number as 1000 or 100, thus it gets its own name, as opposed to in English, where it’s just ten 1000’s.

It’s just like how 1,000,000 is special to us, but it’s just 百万 to them.

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Japanese groups numbers into groupings of 4 instead of 3 like in English.
In English we have ones, tens, hundreds, and then they are grouped together and those are repeated for each section, each grouping of 3 gets it’s own name, thousand, million, billion, trillion, etc.
Japanese has 一、十、百、千 as the base numbers that get repeated, and then they are grouped by section, the first section is 万 the next one is 億 (hundred million). Think of it like putting the commas in different places in the numbers

If you speak English or any other language that groups numbers in threes, it would be natural to assume that 十千 is a valid number, but it’s not how the counting system in Japanese works.

English:
1 - one
10 - ten
100 - one hundred
1,000 - one thousand
10,000 - ten thousand
100,000 - one hundred thousand
1,000,000 - one million
10,000,000 - ten million
100,000,000 - one hundred million
1,000,000,000 - one billion
10,000,000,000 - ten billion
100,000,000,000 - one hundred billion
1,000,000,000,000 - one trillion

Japanese:
1 一
10 十
100 百
1000 千
1,0000 一万
10,0000 十万
100,0000 百万
1000,0000 千万
1,0000,0000 一億
10,0000,0000 十億
100,0000,0000 百億
1000,0000,0000 千億
1,0000,0000,0000 一兆 (pronounced いっちょう)

NOTE: this is not how comas are actually used when writing numbers using Arabic numerals in Japan, it’s just a way of thinking about it.

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I know this yet seeing it visually helps a lot. I wonder why I’ve never done that. Lol

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Where did you see 十千?

I would say the difference is 万 is used and 十千 isn’t.

Okay, this helps a lot. I get it now, thank you

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I never knew that. :0 That’s a really well done explanation, thank you. I always just chalked it up to having options when it comes to presenting things or just one of those cultural things.

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