244 CHAPTER 5. COUNTERS AND COUNTING
it:
”(I) read 1 book every 2 weeks.””(I) read 2 hours a day.””Oh, (I) don’t really read that much.”Of course, in the context of currency is always understood as
meaning ”how much” in terms of money.
Other major currency counters are , the (US) dollar, , the
euro and , the (British) pound.
- Floor surface
Traditional Japanese houses, or traditional rooms in apartment buildings
or flats in Japan (called
, literally ’Japanese style room’), are never
counted in terms of square feet or meters, but in terms of how many tatami
mats,
, it will fit. This unit of measure is one of the ’common knowl-
edge’ units of surface measure, so it’s generally a good idea to know it.
The size of tatami mats depends on the region, ranging from 0.955 meter
by 1.91 meter in the Kyoto area to only 0.88 meter by 1.76 meter in the
Tokyo area. Thus, a room may be bigger or smaller, depending on
where in Japan you find it.
The counting table is fairly simple:
( ) ( )Typically, however, there are only three counts for , namely the
common room dimensions for Japanese style rooms: (four and a