The other day I was talking with my wife and daughter about an article I'd seen, which said the film Space Pocahontas Avatar had earned an unprecedented 2 billion dollars in ticket sales. "How much money is that?" my daughter asked, so I tried to tell her...then fell flat on my face. Numbers are notoriously difficult to work with in Japanese, since instead of the Arabic system that's based on the unit 1,000 they use the Chinese system which uses 10,000 (mahn) as a base unit, followed by oku which has a value of 100 million. Numbers themselves are exactly the same, of course, and a Japanese math book would have the same written formulas that a Western one would; it's the act of verbally expressing large numbers that's such a challenge. In the end, it took the three of us several minutes of intense discussion to figure how to express the number $2,000,000,000 properly in Japanese yen.
Which works better for you? I think I like the Disney-animated one best.
