ICHIRAN/DICT> (length (get-kana-forms 1547720))
186
Plurals! Oh, that's my favorite topic that I'm working on right now. -tachi is mostly used with people, so can't be used in most context. For inanimate objects you just say the number of them. And that's where the counters come in... At which point any sane person gives up learning Japanese for good.
Past tense, isn't that the same as conjugations? Also your rules don't really work. "tanoshii" => "tanoshiideshita"? Pretty sure that's not a word. The correct past tense is "tanoshikatta [desu]".
Tons of words are uncountable, like water, bread, and so on.
A slice of bread, a loaf of bread, a bread roll (Hey, why did that one come after the 'bread'...)
We even have lots of words that are both countable and uncountable. "I ate some tomato" and "I ate some tomatoes" has quite different meaning.
Overall I think all languages have their foibles, and trying to hold one widely used natural language up as "More regular" or "more difficult" is a pretty fruitless endeavour. Thought it is fun to talk about ;)
This doesn't seem that unusual to me, all things considered. "Bread", as a word, is more of a substance-noun than a discrete object-noun.
Moreover, "slice" and "loaf" don't strike me as words which give meaning to the phrases "slice of bread" or "loaf of bread"- in fact, it's the other way around. For instance, "slice" is the primary noun, and "bread" is just meant to distinguish it from other "slices" (e.g. "slice of pizza").
So, when I say "Pass me two slices of pizza", I'm really saying "Pass me two 'slice-of-pizza's", rather than "Pass me 'two-slices' of pizza".
1. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%AB%E8%A1%8C%E5%A4%89%E6...
Edit:
> Past tense, isn't that the same as conjugations? Also your rules don't really work. "tanoshii" => "tanoshiideshita"? Pretty sure that's not a word. The correct past tense is "tanoshikatta [desu]".
'tanishiideshita' is the kind of mistake you make when you're not taught that, in japanese, adjectives conjugate. Sadly, a lot of material glosses over that fact.
Similarly, most material for non-natives like to talk about the -masu form, then describe things as "-masu form without masu" (sigh).
Cumulating "knowledge" from such material, you end up with simplified rules like in GP, which work in some cases, but don't in many others.
Then when you dive more into the language, you either encounter new forms and consider them as such, and are crushed under the sheer number of forms, or have to basically start over, deconstruct what you learned and realize that, in fact, it's all much simpler and structured than what you thought, and what made it all more complex is all the learning material for beginners.
In some ways, it's like maths.
Coming back to the 186 forms for "kuru", I'm sure you only end up with that because of that same learning material "limitations". So you probably end up counting "konai", "konakatta", "konakute", "konakereba", and many other forms as forms of "kuru", when, in fact, they are one form of "kuru" with variants of "nai".
The same material will e.g. also tell you about "-kunai" for the negative form of "-i adjectives", but fail to mention that it's actually "-ku+nai", which explains why you will find forms like "-ku ha nai" or "-ku mo nai". I've never seen those explained in textbooks, but that I'm sure it's not pretty.
If we're counting auxiliary verbs, my system can recognize more than 4000 verb/adjective endings.
I learned this quite early on, but I'm still a little confused for exactly when to conjugate desu instead.
tanoshikatta is literally a predicate stating "was-fun", and desu is just a formality afterwards to make it polite.
this differs from the other kind of adjective ("noun adjectives"), which can't conjugate themselves, so you need desu to change instead.
Of course, the even more polite form is "tanoshuu gozaimashita" (which comes from tanoshiku gozaimashita), but even then it seems to me to be the same form as tanoshikatta if you accept that the latter could've derived from "tanoshiku atta".
I'm not a linguist though, so I do not know if the above ideas are correct, but it's the way I understand Japanese verbs.
For example, "tanoshii" is present/future tense. "tanoshikatta" is past tense. If you want to make it polite, then you just add "desu". Super easy.
While it is grammatically incorrect, it is completely acceptable in normal conversation to do the same with the negation. "tanoshikunai" is the negation. Past tense negation is "tanoshikunakatta" (ye gods, I can't read romaji...). You can do exactly the same thing to make it polite -- just jam "desu" on the end. That's what every child will do. The wrong bit is that "tanoshikunai desu" should really be "tanoshiku arimasen".
For "na" adjectives, it works differently. "suki" is present tense. To make it polite: "suki desu". Past tense is "suki datta". To make it polite "suki deshita". Negation is "suki de wa nai" (seriously, romaji makes me cringe...). Polite negation is "suki de wa arimasen" (though you can very much get away with the mistake of saying "suki de wa nai desu" -- again, every single child speaks this way).
Past tense negation is "suki de wa nakatta". Polite is "suki de wa arimasen deshita" (but again, the easy way is "suki de wa nakatta desu").
So, why is it like this? The reason is that "i" adjectives were originally verbs that had a different set of inflections/conjugations. Very obscure piece of trivia (that most Japanese people don't even know) is that "ohayou gozaimasu" is actually one of those conjugations -- it's actually "(honourific) o hayai de gozaru" in polite form. The "i" ending mixes with "de" to produce the "ou" ending. Anyway, the point is that you have to inflect it because it is literally a verb that is modifying a noun.
"na" adjectives on the other hand are actually adjectives. They are called "na" adjectives because you have to add "na" when modifying the noun. For example, "suki na hito". The "na" is actually a contraction of "ni aru" -- because in Japanese you can only modify nouns with verb phrases.
So this is why there is a difference between the negation of "i" adjectives and "na" adjectives. "ku" is the verb combining form of the old style "i" verbs (like "te" is on modern verbs). So "tanoshikunai" is really "tanoshiku nai" -- you are combining the "tanoshi" verb with the "nai" verb. On the other hand "suki" is actually an adjective, not a verb, so you have to say "suki de wa nai" -- you can't combine them.
Past tense is exactly the same. In "tanoshikunakatta", it's really combining 2 verbs and conjugating the last one (as per the rules" -- "tanoshiku nakatta"). If you want to make it polite, the polite past tense of "nai" is "arimasen deshita" (but you can get away with "nakatta desu" in virtually every situation).
With "na" adjectives -- "suki de wa nakatta", we've conjugated the only verb. Again to make it polite you can say "suki de wa arimasen deshita" (or "suki de wa nakatta desu" if you want to sound like an uneducated bumpkin like me).
Hope this helps! Avoid polite form until you can handle plain form and it's almost all completely logical ;-)
Edit: Fix past tense in the examples of incorrect, but acceptable polite forms.
"5 head of cattle" is exactly analogous to "ushi go tou" (牛五頭)
Most English counters have left common usage but the concept exists. Similar but not the same many people enjoy learning all the names for groups of animals I English. "A murder of crows" for example