cheatsheet
Numbers & prices
Japanese numbers are logical once you crack two things: the building blocks 1-10, and the fact that Japan counts in units of 10,000 (man), not 1,000. Master 1-10 and the price-reading section and you can survive any cash register or menu.
0-10
Your foundation. 4, 7, 9 have two readings each — the ones below are the safe defaults for counting and prices. Learn these cold; everything else is built from them.
11-19
Dead simple: ten + the digit. 'juu' then the number. No exceptions here.
Tens (20-90)
Just as clean: digit + 'juu'. Two-ten = 20, three-ten = 30, and so on. To fill in between, add a digit on the end (e.g. 25 = ni-juu-go).
Hundreds, thousands, man (10,000)
Watch the sound-change hotspots: 300, 600, 800 and 3000, 8000 mutate slightly (and 1000/1man drop the 'ichi'). These are the few irregulars worth memorizing — they're flagged below.
Reading yen prices
Prices are written ¥ or 円 (en). 円 is read 'en' — the 'y' in 'yen' is just an old romanization quirk; Japanese say 'en'. The price tag uses Western digits with commas every 3 (¥1,500), but you READ the number in the Japanese 10,000-grouping system. Coins go up to ¥500; bills are ¥1,000 / ¥5,000 / ¥10,000. There's no ¥2,000 in common use.
Saying a quantity out loud (worked examples)
The trick for big numbers: regroup the digits around 'man' (10,000). A price tag like 38,000 isn't 'thirty-eight thousand' — it's 'three-man eight-sen' (3×10,000 + 8×1,000). Slide a comma in your head after every 4 digits, not 3.