Does casual Japanese use “broken” numerals in conversation?

9 comments

1. I don’t know the answer, but I’d like to include another example: Time. In English, we often break up the numbers before and after the : and say them individually. For example, we might say “It’s two twenty seven (2:27)”, or “It’s ten to/til five (4:50)”.

   Are there similar shortcuts in Japanese?

2. I haven’t come across anything similar yet, in my experience they usually spell out the number as normal. But I would like to point out that

   > For example, if I were to verbally say I was born in 1996, I would say, “I was born in nineteen ninety six” instead of, “I was born in one thousand nine hundred and ninety six.

   “Nineteen nintety-six” is actually the correct form? Nobody says “one thousand nine hundred and ninenty-six” to mean the year, lol.

3. There are a few examples that I can think of off the top of my head.

   3 digit numbers (room number 206, Shibuya 109) are often used as individual numbers (二丸六号室 (に まる ろく ごうしつ) 一丸きゅう (いち まる きゅう) respectively)

   In addition, jock culture (or more precisely sports club culture) often contracts numbers to make them easier to say. All 2 syllable numbers get contracted to 1 syllable to make it easier to chant
   Rather than your traditional “ichi ni san yon go roku nana, hachi, etc…) it becomes (ich, ni, san, shi, go, rok, shich, hach, etc… )

   Regarding your example (years), there’s little need to contract the number. The Japanese mainly use the [Japanese calendar ](http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~watson/ref/mtsh.html) to say contemporary years (1867–present). This system is tied to the reign of the emperor of that particular year. So for example, 1877 would be 明治10年 (めいじ じゅう ねん). The only numerical exception to the rule is year 1, which can also be referred to as 元年 (がんねん). So for example, if you were born in 1989, you could say you were born in 平成元年 (へいせい がんねん). The western calendar is starting to gain more popularity, as it’s quite easy to say the years from 2000—2099 (as you can omit the hundred ordinal 百 ひゃく), and is also used for historical dates (pre 1867>

   I hope this answers your question somewhat.

4. I’ve never heard it abbreviated unless they are talking about music (Anpanman Ondo ’89)

   In my experience, they generally avoid this by stating relative years (5 years ago) or they’ll say the full year, though older people like they Reiwa version as does my dental clinic (whyyyy)

5. The closest I can think of is I know some folks who told me their height in cm, but omitting the hundreds. Like, (身長は)70センチです, when they are 170cm tall. (This was in a sports club context in case you’re wondering why this would ever come up.)

   BTW I would not use the term “broken” to describe this in English. Those used are all grammatically correct, but some might be mostly used in informal contexts.

6. Yes.

   Whenever I’ve dealt with years, phone numbers, and some other examples I can’t think of at businesses, or the ward office, then it’s spelled like ichi, ku, ku, roku. Sometimes when dealing with years I default to Heisei/Reiwa, but if it’s western, it’s spelled out.

   The Olympics were also ni-zero-ni-zero as another example.

7. For year, phone number, house number, etc, my teacher always tells me to “spell” the numbers individually, sometimes adding の between the are code and the rest of the numbers for a phone number.

8. Another example is prices for goods.

   They tend to end prices with 98 and say きゅっぱ (kyuppa) at the end. The number of trailing zeroes is usually gleaned from context. (usually people know the price of goods within a multiple of ten)

   ie. a used car is 3,980,000 yen the salesman might say something like:

   こちらの[車種](#fg “しゃしゅ”)はお[得](#fg “とく”)の[398](#fg “さんきゅっぱ”)でございます！いかがでしょう？

9. The build up to the Olympics had a lot of 「東京にゼロにゼロ」” in addition to 「東京にせんにじゅうねん」。

   I also second what another commenter said about room numbers. I’ve lived in a few apartments and always used the「に　まる　ろく」pattern.