Language Fun

I took four years of Japanese in high-school, and the longer I stay here the more words are coming back. Unfortunately I would say that my vocabulary is only around 100 words, yet I am able to have extremely basic conversations (with lots of gesturing) about such topics as:

* Where is ...?
* How much for this?
* Two, please
* Do you do take-out?
* Is there an english menu?
* Thank you, Hello, How are you, nice to meet you, etc.

I have recently been relearning the 'generic' counters. In Japanese, in addition to the normal numbers there are sets of counters for all sorts of things. For example, if you're talking about a number of small animals, you use the counter 'hiki'. So you'd say: Two dogs-hiki. If you were talking about large animals, you'd say: Two horses-to. And so on. Anyways, I have been re-learning the 'generic' set, which is the one you use if you don't know the counter for the thing you are talking about.

While buying lunch today the woman helping me corrected my counter (since we were talking about long thin items and therefore should have been using -hon), and that motivated me to look into it a little more. Turns out there are hundreds of different counter types:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word#Full_list_of_counters

Yikes! I think I'll stick with just the generic ones.

Also, I had an amusing 'conversation' with a clerk at our local supermarket today. I was trying to ask which of the many bottles of liquor in the booze aisle were sake bottles. He looked very confused by the question and pointed me to the beer and all around. I asked again and got another confused look. Eventually I just picked a bottle. When I got home I looked it up and in Japanese 'sake' means alcoholic drinks in general...I can understand the clerk's confusion now! The word I was looking for was Nihonshu...