"It's complicated"

What about this one?

1 = 壹 2 = 貳 3 = 參 4 = 肆 5 = 伍

These exist as well.

They're used in places where numbers should NOT be forged(i.e. bank documents...)

This is how they got their numeric meanings btw.

The concept of zero is scary, so it's a wizard shooting lightning from all orifices. Makes sense.

No one has mentioned special 2, 两! It’s only for counting certain things.

Sure, when you mean "zero" it may look a bit excessive. But it's quite adequate if you want to express "Void, the Dark Realm of Nothingness and End of All Things".

ps: Glory to ZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ.

"Three, Two, One... NOTHING"

scratches head in Mandarin

Yeah líng 零 is pretty annoying as a learner of the language.

The top character is yŭ 雨 which means rain. Confusingly, this is the semantic component - the part that contains the meaning of the character. Explained below.

The bottom character líng 令 means order/command as a noun and verb. This doesn't add meaning, it is the phonetic component: basically a pronunciation cue.

It originally meant "light rain"/"falling in drops, like rain", actually. It began being used to mean "fragments" or "leftover part", then as "remainder" in the mathematical sense. Then, eventually, to mean 0. Another form of líng is 霝 which means raindrops. It has 3 kŏu 口 ("mouth") characters on the bottom to visually represent drops.

So, like a lot of Chinese characters, it really only makes sense when you understand the etymology - and even then it's kind of a stretch

You don't divide by 0 in Chinese because he'll jump off the page and kick your ass.

Lmao, I just picked up learning Kanji again after like 3 years (never had time in grad school)

It is rough. But fierce repetition helps a lot. I can see the characters for "read a book" whenever I close my eyelids now hahaha

Once something turns into muscle memory you don't forget.

write all of the numbers on top of each other then scribble on them. does that look anything like zero? i don't know kanji, i'm just understanding my own bad handwriting and trying to understand how they'd get there

Japanese enters the chat:

Left: numeral; middle: regular writing; final: certain formal and non-forgery usecases.

または in point 7 means either variant is OK

The last line says one can use the modern yen sign as well (though some would argue that it's bad manners in at least some situations, but I have no dog in that fight).

万 = 10k. Several countries use both 1k and 10k units (Japan traditionally was on the 10k side but had a lot of influence so now we see both a lot. A used car price might be 130万円 or something ( = 1,300,000 yen)

数字	通常の漢字	金額で使う旧字体（大字）  
0	零	零  
1	一	壱  
2	二	弐  
3	三	参  
4	四	肆  
5	五	伍  
6	六	陸  
7	七	柒（または 漆）  
8	八	捌  
9	九	玖  
10	十	拾  
100	百	佰  
1k	千	仟  
万	万	萬  
円	円	圓（もしくは「円」のまま）  

Chart from here that looks better: https://saiseich.com/business/kanji_kingaku/

We have a way of writing numbers in certain situations. Think of it like checks in the US where we write things in a certain way so that the numbers can't be easily changed to increase the value or something.

well atleast this post + Comments taught me some Chinese.

Three pigs

Two pigs

One pig

Zero pig ? Or zero pigs?

Honest question. Do we pluralize nouns of zero count? Or should they be singular?