VocabularyJLPT N5 · core

枚

まい

hepburn mai

counter for thin/flat objects

Part of speech · counter

Pattern visualization

no decomposition available

Examples

紙を一枚ください。
Please give me one sheet of paper.
チケットを二枚買いました。
I bought two tickets.

Collocations

枚 (mai, sheet counter)一枚 (ichimai, 1 sheet)二枚 (nimai, 2 sheets)何枚 (nan-mai, how many sheets)本 (hon, slim cylindrical counter)

Mnemonic

Mai (枚) counts "thin flat objects" — paper, tickets, plates, clothes, CDs, photos. A flagship of the Japanese counter system: English uses "sheet of / piece of," but Japanese splits counters precisely by object shape. Examples: kami san-mai (3 sheets), shatsu ni-mai (2 shirts), sara go-mai (5 plates), shashin juu-mai (10 photos), kaado ichi-mai (1 card). Other counter clusters: hon (slim cylindrical: pens, umbrellas, bottles, roads), ko (small general objects), satsu (books, magazines), dai (machines, vehicles), nin (people), hiki (small animals), tou (large animals). Japanese has 50+ counters by object shape and category — a major intermediate hurdle. Mai shows little rendaku: ichimai, nimai, sanmai, etc. Korean "jang / mae / gwon / dae / myeong / mari" parallels but Japanese sub-categorizes more finely.

Quick check

Counter for "3 umbrellas" in Japanese?