Understanding fifty million yen
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Here’s a curious little quicky poll taken by Research Panel. It is tagged as their Day Research, where they get as many members of the monitor panel to vote on a question of the day for a couple of points. They asked their panel which of the following ways of writing out fifty million yen was easiest to understand. Note that in Japanese, the equivalent of our thousand is ten thousand, so instead of in English one thousand, one million, one billion, etc, Japanese goes ten thousand, hundred million, one trillion, etc. So, with that in mind, 3 ten thousands and 2549 people voted this way on the easiest-to-understand form.
Top by a long way was 84.9% choosing 5千万円, 5-thousand-ten thousand yen. Next, 10.8% chose the longhand 50,000,000 yen, the easiest form for me. 2.6% said 50,000千円, 5,000-ten thousand yen, then 1.8% 50百万円, 50-hundred-ten thousand yen.
By the way, the pictured money is fake!
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The final two options are the sort of thing you see in financial tables at the back of corporate reports. (Makes things quite easy for the translator when it’s time to turn them into thousands/millions of yen.) Interesting that there are even that many respondents opting for them, but I suppose they might be the sort of people who read such reports all the time . . .
No half-an-oku or some such? I mean, if it were an isolated figure, with emphasis on its size, I’d have thought that the easiest, but then again, I’ve never heard such convention ever really come up in Japanese. For non-isolated figures, either written out in kanji or numerals is clearly the most logical.