I’m a bit confused by how I’m supposed to remember this. Like if I was to write 二人, I would finish it with り, but if I was writing 三人, I would finish it with a にん? I kind of understand if I was writing just 人 since that’s singular, but why does it change depending on the number of people?
2 comments
Originally the り counting series went further than 2 (there was みたり、よたり, etc) but for some reason the sino-Japanese numbers replaced those for all but 1 and 2. There’s no clear reason why this happened; a lot of language development is irregular (look at the numbers for the dates, which are a lot more chaotic than people). Sometimes the more frequent something is, the more irregular forms stick around — maybe 1 and 2 people were just more common than 3+.
part of the problem here is that you’re expecting to read kanji individually and it’s not how it works. 二人 is pronounced the was it is because that’s the way the word is pronounced, you can’t break it into pieces and pronounce each letter any more than you can expect the same sequence of letters in english to have the same pronunciation in all words.
just like some words in english use penta- and some use quint- for a general concept of 5, there are multiple kinds of counters, and sometimes they shifted and morphed over hundreds of years. many counters have exceptions in them, so you need to get used to it.