In this skill
Take Numbers 11–99 first. The prices below aren’t round — most have live tens and ones digits — and their tails assume that skill’s ear.
The core’s answer to prices is honest and it works: the register shows the number, and kaite kudasai covers everything else. This skill is for the moments between — the clerk says the total while you’re still reaching for your wallet, the izakaya tab arrives spoken, the ryokan quotes a night over the phone. Catching the number as it’s said is pure ear-speed, and prices are the single most common numbers Japan will ever say to you.
One reality check before the drills: spoken totals are almost never round. Shelf prices flirt with round shapes, but consumption tax is baked into every total, so what the clerk actually says is ¥429, ¥1,057, ¥6,834 — ragged to the single yen. Round prices are the special case: vending machines, ticket-machine restaurants, admission gates. The drills below are weighted the same way reality is — ragged as the rule, round as the exception. (Comfort while you drill: the front of the number — the man, the thousands, the hundreds — is the part your wallet needs. The ones digit is the least important thing you’ll hear, and the register always shows it anyway.)
What this skill actually adds is small and closed. First, five sounds change — and only five:
- 300 = sanbyaku (not “sanhyaku”) · 600 = roppyaku · 800 = happyaku
- 3,000 = sanzen (not “sansen”) · 8,000 = hassen
Every other hundred and thousand is the plain glue you expect: 400 yonhyaku, 500 gohyaku, 2,000 nisen, 9,000 kyuusen. And en itself never changes shape, ever.
Second, the pivot at 10,000: Japanese doesn’t count big money in thousands but in man — units of ten thousand, the word you’ve had since Lesson 3’s ichiman-en. So ¥38,940 isn’t “thirty-eight thousand…”; it starts sanman — “three man” — and the rest is just a smaller price glued on. Hotel bills live in man country; hear the man first and the rest falls into place.
As always: tap each price and listen first, say it back, then check yourself against the amount that appears. Tap again to listen as often as you like.
The drill: konbini country (under ¥1,000)
Tax-ragged totals, plus the three changed-sound hundreds standing alone the way a shokken button or vending machine prices them:
The drill: meals and tickets (¥1,000–¥9,999)
Sen country, spoken like a receipt — with sanzen and hassen drilled both pure and buried in the middle of a real total:
The drill: man country (¥10,000 and up)
Hotel bills with the taxes already in, and one round quoted rate. Hear the man, then it’s just the previous section again:
Anki deck
Thirty prices, audio-first: download the Prices at Speed Anki deck. Hear the price, know the amount before the reveal — magnitude first, ones digit last — and let the five changed sounds (sanbyaku, roppyaku, happyaku, sanzen, hassen) stop feeling like exceptions. In the wild, the register is still your backup; this deck is for the day you notice you didn’t need it.