nihongo wo benkyou shitai

Right, there' s just no easy way to put this. Counters SUCK! Along with particles (助詞 if you want the kanji), there are the single most irritating thing that the Japanese language has to offer. It's not that they are hard, but there's just way too many to be healthy.

Rule 1 is that the number of items goes AFTER the thing your counting. The grammatical structure is:

[noun] を[number][counter]
[noun] が[number][counter]

As far as I can tell, if you are counting living things, use が otherwise use を.

Where is starts to fall apart is when we look at the vast number of counters on offer. I won't say how many there are - it's far too depressing - but there are a lot! here are some I know:

個 (こ) 　　small items
冊 (さつ) bound paperwork (books, papers, magazines etc.)
本 (ほん) long/cylindrical objects (bottles, er... cylinders etc.)
台 (だい ) equipment (cars, combine harvesters etc.)
枚 (まい) thin, flat objects (belts, shirts etc.)
人 (にん) people
階 (かい) floors of buildings
匹 (ぴき) small animals

And the list goes on....

English: I bought 4 magazines yesterday.
Jenglish: [yesterday][magazines][4 bound paperwork][bought]
日本語： 昨日雑誌を４冊を買いました。

Counters will come up again... but in the meantime, can anyone give me a list of the top 10 or 15 most frequently used counters in Japanese?